■ECTIC ENGLISH CLASSICS 



AN ESSAY 



ON 



ROBERT BURNS 



THOMAS CARLYLE 




AMERICAN • BOOK • COMPANY 4 



NEW YORK- CINCINNATI • CHICAGO * 

I 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

Ciiap. Copyright No...(^_i- 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




ii-v^^^^^-s-viCj V^A,^y-k,U^ 



ECLECTIC ENGLISH CLASSICS 



AN ESSAY 



ON 



ROBERT BURNS 



THOMAS CARLYLE 



i ^ . 

roEC 3 '.««* 



"V 



NEW YORK •:• CINCINNATI •:• CHICAGO 

AMERICAN BOOK COMPANY 
i8q6 



K^. 






Copyright, 1896, by 

American Book Company. 

carlyle's burns. 

w. p. I 



INTRODUCTION. 



Thomas Carlyle was born on the 4th of December, 1795, at 
Ecclefechan, in Annandale, Scotland. His father, a mason (al- 
though descended from a family once distinguished on the border), 
was a man of sterling worth and of undeveloped capacities that 
Thomas himself did not hesitate to compare with those of Burns, 
His mother, to whom his attachment was unusually close, was 
also high-minded and deeply rehgious, but could not even write 
until she taught herself when her sons went out into the world. 

In 1809, his fifteenth year, his father, "from his small, hard- 
earned funds," sent Thomas to Edinburgh University to prepare 
for the ministry. As was the custom, Carlyle made the journey on 
foot, — one hundred miles in five days, — and set diligently to work 
in the throng of frugal, ambitious youths characteristic of Scottish 
universities. Aside from the wide range of reading open to him 
here, however, he found little instruction that he valued, except 
that in mathematics. At the end of his college course he became 
a rural divinity student, being thus free to support himself by 
teaching. 

In 1 8 18, finding the school work altogether repugnant to his 

shy, proud nature, and having decided to give up the ministry on 

account of increasing rehgious doubts, he went to Edinburgh to 

read law, supporting himself by writing articles for the " Edin- 

5 



6 INTRODUCTION. 

burgh Encyclopedia," and a life of Schiller for the " London 
Magazine," and by translating Legendre's "Geometry" and 
Goethe's " Wilhelm Meister." In addition he received pupils, 
and in 1822 became tutor to Charles Buller, afterwards a brilliant 
member of Parhament. In 1825 his " Life of Schiller " was pub- 
lished in book form, and called forth a letter of commendation 
from Goethe, whom Carlyle profoundly admired. 

Meantime, the dyspepsia which clouded all his Hfe had been 
brought, by comfortless lodgings, to a pitch of almost intolerable 
intensity. In October, 1826, however, he married the charming 
and intellectual Jane Welsh, a descendant of John Knox; and 
her devoted attention to his needs, and even to his many whims, 
not to speak of the graceful diplomacy by which she guarded his 
quiet alike against admiring visitors and his neighbors' fowls and 
pianos, wrought a considerable improvement in his health. Never- 
theless he was at no time a really well man. 

After about a year in Edinburgh, marked by the pubhcation 
of " Specimens of German Romance," poverty obhged Carlyle to 
retire to Craigenputtoch, a small estate belonging to his wife, near 
Dumfries, in a region which he called "the lonehest, mooriest, 
and dullest in nature." Here, with occasional excursions into 
the world, they lived frugally for seven years, both having resolved 
that Carlyle should not stoop to write without convictions for the 
sake of money. Being convinced, however, that the modern ht- 
erature of Germany was not only much richer, but also more 
intellectual and sincere than that of England, Carlyle continued 
the series of essays on German authors republished with other 
essays, in 1838, as "Miscellanies." 

But the most characteristic product of his seclusion was " Sartor 
Resartus " (" the tailor sewed over "), which, professing to review 



INTRODUCTION. 7 

a German " Philosophy of Clothes," — i.e., of the institutions and 
conventions of human life, — records the history of its author, a 
fictitious Herr Teufelsdrockh. Under this grotesque disguise, and 
in a style now full of riotous humor and again impressively solemn, 
Carlyle recorded his own inward experiences and his speculations 
on things in general. The book frightened the EngHsh pubhshers, 
and was unsuccessful in " Fraser's Magazine." America, however, 
where the transcendental movement had begun, was ready to 
welcome it eagerly, and it was first published in book form there 
in 1836, with an introduction by Emerson, who had sought out 
Carlyle at Craigenputtoch, and entered into a lasting friendship 
with him. 

Meantime Carlyle had turned his attention more and more to 
France, and had written essays on Diderot and other eighteenth- 
century philosophers, and on the famous scandal of the diamond 
necklace. Finally, he decided to write a history of the French 
Revolution, and for the sake of wider study moved to London, 
where he made his home for the rest of his life at No. 5 Cheyne 
Row, Chelsea. In 1837 appeared "The French Revolution," a 
" prose epic " rather than a history, picturing in lurid light and 
baleful shadow what he regarded as a divine retribution for cen- 
turies of cruelty and frivolity. The book brought httle immediate 
profit, the first payment for it being a very welcome sum of fifty 
pounds from the American edition, sent by Emerson in 1838. 

Accordingly, in 1837, Carlyle was obliged to deliver a series 
of lectures on German hterature, which was very successful, and 
was followed in succeeding years by one on the history of litera- 
ture, by another on the revolutions of modern Europe, and finally 
by the famous series afterwards published under the title, " Heroes 
and Hero Worship." 



8 INTRODUCTION. 

In 1 837 a pamphlet entitled " Chartism," and in 1 843 " Past and 
Present," testified to Carlyle's anxious interest in current events ; 
and in 1845 appeared " Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches, 
with Elucidations and a Continuous Narrative," a vindication of 
the Protector's character, involving immense research, and called 
by Taine Carlyle's greatest work. In 1850, wrought up by the 
general political disturbances of 1848, he fiercely attacked the 
constitution and the utilitarian ideals of English society in " Lat- 
ter-day Pamphlets." In 185 1 dissatisfaction with a memoir of 
the poet John Sterling called from Carlyle a life of his friend, 
which has been called " the best biography of its size in the lan- 
guage." In 1858 he completed the largest of his works, the prod- 
uct of thirteen years of research among Prussian documents, 
" The History of Friedrich II., called Frederick the Great." 

Long before this his reputation had become established, and 
he had not a few enthusiastic adherents and friends in all ranks. 
Now he was chosen lord rector of Edinburgh University, and 
delivered there an address, the reception of which was, in Tyn- 
dall's words, " a perfect triumph." While he was still absent on 
this errand the sudden death of Mrs. Carlyle left his home desolate. 
This loss, and a palsy that soon crippled his hand, made the old 
man's heart fail him. 

The fifteen years that remained to him of life were productive of 
nothing but a volume of " Reminiscences " of his wife, his father, 
and his friend Edward Irving. These, though left unrevised at 
his death in 1881, were published by his literary executor, J. A. 
Froude, the historian, together with a memoir of Carlyle's early 
life, and the letters of Mrs. Carlyle, These letters, though pos- 
sessed of great literary charm and much biographical interest, 
have been generally deemed too intimate for publication. Never- 



INTRODUCTION. 9 

theless they merely reveal two natures essentially just, faithful, 
and sincere, and enable us to discern in Carlyle himself, beneath the 
familiar, rugged figure of the prophet of evil wrapped in a " cloud 
of whim and dyspepsia," the deep and tender heart of the man 
of whom Emerson could say, " I never saw more amiableness 
than is in his countenance." 

By inheritance and purpose Carlyle was a " Calvinist without 
the theology," as nearly akin to his heroes, Knox and Cromwell, 
as their different epochs would permit. His philosophy of life is 
their faith under new forms, attained by " the same doubts, de- 
spairs, inner conflicts, exaltations." To him, as to them, the uni- 
verse is one vast and awful " symbol of God ; " the end of man's 
being is " to do without happiness, and instead thereof find bless- 
edness," and man's first duty is to find for what work he is fitted 
and do it " with his whole might." It is not strange, therefore, 
that, in the words of Taine, the great French critic, Carlyle passes 
his life " in expressing and impressing veneration and fear ; " and 
that " all his books are preachings," or that he held it to be his 
pecuKar mission to assail comfortable shams, and proclaim with 
vehemence the truths which the spectacle of life seemed to force 
upon his perception. 

His main philosophical conceptions were derived from the vast 
intellectual movement wherein, says Taine, "from 1780 to 1830 
Germany produced all the ideas of our historic age;" but they 
are developed in his own fashion and somewhat narrowed in the 
process. He would "reduce the heart of man to the English 
sentiment of duty, and his imagination to the English sentiment 
of respect." His entire conception of history seems to depend 
upon a fancied necessity for heroes and hero worship. " Religion 
and society," he declares, " are based on man's admiration for one 



lO INTRODUCTION. 

higher than himself." Hence he would regard in history only the 
growth and influence of impassioned souls. But he esteems a 
man great only in proportion to the truth that is in him. " It is 
the property of the hero in every time, in every situation, that he 
comes back to reality ; that he stands upon things, and not shows 
of things." This devotion to reahties in Burns was an important 
source of Carlyle's admiration for him. 

Carlyle himself was possessed with the " sentiment of actuality." 
He verified dates and texts and traditions, and visited and re- 
visited Frederick's country and Cromwell's, that, by accurately 
conceiving their surroundings, he might better understand them. 
" He pierces mountains of paper erudition," says Taine, " and 
enters into the hearts of men. Everywhere he goes beyond 
political and conventional history. He divines character, compre- 
hends the spirit of extinguished ages, feels better than any Eng- 
lishman the great revolutions of the soul. . . . He wishes to 
draw from history a positive and active law for himself and us. 
And when he has seized the fact he drags it so energetically 
before us, . . . he illumines it by such contrasts of extraordinary 
images, that we are infected and, in spite of ourselves, reach the 
intensity of his behef and vision." 

But Carlyle's faith in hero worship as a cure for all human ills 
proves him, says Mr. Richard Hutton, " devoid of the one most 
essential element in the true historical sense, — the appreciation 
of the inherited conditions and ineradicable habits of ordinary 
national hfe." Regarding mankind as a helpless herd without 
will or wisdom, he loses all sense of justice, and comes to justify 
the brute force of the slave driver, and to make a hero of the 
narrow and tyrannical Frederick. 

Nevertheless, " though not the safest of guides in pohtics," in 



INTRODUCTION. 1 1 

the judgment of Lowell, " his value as an inspirer and awakener 
cannot be overestimated. It is a power which belongs only to 
the highest order of minds, for it is none but a divine fire that 
can so kindle and irradiate. The debt due him from those who 
listened to the teachings of his prime, for revealing to them what 
sublime reserves of power even the humblest may find in manli- 
ness, sincerity, and self-reliance, can be paid with nothing short 
of reverential gratitude." 

By his sympathetic penetration into character Carlyle is " the 
first in insight of EngHsh critics," as by the force of his imagina- 
tion — his power of showing us the past by flashes of lightning — 
" he is the most vivid and poetic of word painters." " He has," 
says Lowell, " every quality of a great poet, except that supreme 
one of rhythm, which shapes both matter and manner to harmoni- 
ous proportion." His style, as developed in " Sartor Resartus " 
and later works into finished " Carlylese," is an apparently whim- 
sical mingling of tempestuous declamation and grotesque humor, 
with passages of rare and serious beauty. At one moment he 
satirically explains the utilitarian creed that regulates the " whole 
duty of pigs " and their human counterparts ; at the next he de- 
scribes, in sweet and solemn cadences, the sunset at the North 
Cape : "Who would speak or be looked on when behind him lies 
all Europe and Africa fast asleep, except the watchman, and be- 
fore him the silent immensity and palace of the Eternal, whereof 
our sun is but a porch lamp? " 

" The secret of Carlyle's style," says Mr. Hutton, " is a great 
crowding in of contrasted ideas and colors ; indeed, such a crowd- 
ing that for any purpose but his it would be wholly false art. 
Nothing, however, is so well adapted to teach one that the truest 
language on the deepest subjects is thrown out, as it were, with 



1 2 INTROD UCTION. 

more or less happy effect, at great realities far above our analysis 
or grasp. . . . Carlyle was by far the greatest interpreter our 
literature has ever had of the infinite forces working through so- 
ciety, ... of the dim struggle of man's nature with the passions, 
doubts, and confusions by which it is surrounded." 

Carlyle's "Essay on Burns," written in 1828 for the "Edin- 
burgh Review," is one of the most just and eloquent of his works, 
and has largely influenced the subsequent estimation of the poet. 
His opinions of his great countryman derive a peculiar interest 
from the similarity of the origins of these two men. Both Carlyle 
and Burns were born in the rugged, somewhat lawless border 
region of southwestern Scotland ; and both were of what Carlyle 
calls "the fairest descent,— that of the pious, the just, and the 
wise." Burns's father, like Carlyle's, was an austerely religious 
man of deep, silent affections, " a man of strength and a man of 
toil." Doubtless, as Carlyle himself conjectures, the elder Bums, 
had he not fallen into financial difficulties, would, like the elder 
Carlyle, " have given his son that university training which, how- 
ever Carlyle might scoff at it, enabled him to face boldly the 
scholarship of others." 

The date of the essay was propitious. Had it been written 
many years later, Carlyle's insight would have had to cross a 
greater interval to reach a sympathetic understanding of Burns's 
worldly failure, than when he had himself just retreated to Craig- 
enputtoch, in serious doubt whether the world would ever grant 
him a Uvelihood in return for the ratings which were all he could 
offer it. 

The clear and simple style of Carlyle's early works is a better 
medium for the elucidation of his subject than the sardonic humor 
and hurried metaphors that give force to his later exhortations. 



INTRODUCTION. 13 

Indeed, his titanic, brooding genius, inclining by its very nature 
to excess of one kind or another, tended as it developed to destroy 
more and more the balance of his judgment, so that Carlyle com- 
pletely manifested his power as " the greatest dramatic imagina- 
tion of his time " only as he ceased to be its " profoundest critic." 

Robert Burns was born at Alloway, in the parish of Ayr, in 
Dumfriesshire, on the 25th of January, 1759. His father, William 
Burnes, a nursery gardener, superior to his neighbors both in 
mental power and in family traditions, made every effort to give 
his sons the best education attainable, and taught them at home 
when no better instruction offered. Robert's most valuable 
teacher was a Mf. Murdoch, of more than ordinary ability, who 
made him an " excellent English scholar," helped him to get a 
smattering of French, and made important additions to his scanty 
stock of books, among them the works of Pope. Biurns's mother, 
— from whom he is said to have inherited "his lyrical gift, his 
wit, his mirth," — with an old woman in the family, stored his 
memory with the legends and ballads of the countryside. 

In Robert's sixteenth year his father fell into financial difficul- 
ties, and the anxieties and poor living of this time probably un- 
dermined his health and strengthened his inherited tendency to 
melancholy. Soon after, the family moved to the farm of Lochlea, 
at Tarbolton, where the sons were paid seven pounds a year for 
their labor. 

At seventeen Burns, much to his father's displeasure, had at- 
tended a dancing school " to give his manners a brush," and 
thenceforth, says his brother Gilbert, he was " constantly the vic- 
tim of some fair enslaver." He had already begun to address 
verses to his various loves ; had read Sterne, Ramsay, and Ossian, 



1 4 INTROD UCTION. 

and followed his plow with a book of English songs always at 
hand. 

In Burns's twenty-third year he went to Irvine to work at flax 
dressing, a venture which had serious consequences. His partner 
was dishonest; his shop was burned; worse than all, he fell in 
with dissipated acquaintances who broke down forever those habits 
of sober uprightness which had hitherto ruled his conduct. Here, 
however, he fell in with the poems of Fergusson, which, more than 
any others, seem to have encouraged him to try his own powers. 

In 1784 Wilham Burnes died, and his children took the farm 
of Mossgiel, at Manchline. In 1785 came the first outbreak of 
Burns's genius, producing " The Cotter's Saturday Night," " To a 
Mouse," the " Address to the Deil," and many other poems, in- 
cluding several satires upon the strict Calvinistic doctrines of the 
" Auld Licht," or conservative, section of the Scottish church. 

The next year, also rich in poetical production, brought the 
poet himself into misfortunes, monetary and personal. He had 
lost his character for upright conduct through his informal mar- 
riage contract with Jean Armour, and her family had " uncoupled 
the merciless pack of the law at his heels." In his anger and 
distress. Burns engaged to go to Jamaica as a bookkeeper, and 
pubHshed six hundred copies of his poems in the hope of making 
nine pounds for his passage money. Meantime, as Jean Armour 
refused to fulfill the contract, he was free to betroth himself to 
Mary Campbell. After the parting vows described in " Highland 
Mary," she went to her home to prepare for the marriage, and 
there died. Her lover, having gained twenty pounds by the 
Kilmarnock edition, was about to sail alone, when enthusiastic 
predictions of success for a second edition prompted him to take 
his poems to Edinburgh. 



INTROD UCTION. 1 5 

Arriving in the capital in November, 1786, he became the lion 
of fashionable and learned society, and spent the winter in super- 
intending the new issue of three thousand copies. During the 
summer he made a tour in the Highlands and, as a great man 
now, visited his old home. 

Through much of his second winter in Edinburgh he was 
confined to his room by an accident, and found his chief interest 
in a literary and passionate correspondence with a Mrs. M'Lehose, 
to whom he gave the name of " Clarinda." In the spring, having 
applied for a position in the excise service, as a resource in case 
of bad fortune, he rented the farm of EUisland, received his prof- 
its from the new edition, — some five hundred pounds, of which 
he gave about a third to his family, — and was married, after all, 
to Jean Armour. 

Early in the next. year, as his farm was proving "a ruinous 
affair," he entered on active service in the excise. Despite this 
exacting work, he wrote in this year " Tam o' Shanter," and com- 
posed songs to old Scotch tunes for Johnson's " Musical Mu- 
seum." At the end of 1791 he moved to Dumfries, where he 
was at first well received by the higher class of residents. Town 
life, however, not only deprived him of much of his natural in- 
spiration, but increased the drain upon his diminished resources ; 
so that, for the first time in the hfe that had seemed so careless 
and jovial, he fell into debt. His rashly expressed democratic 
opinions, too, as well as the convivial excesses into which he was 
drawn by his popularity and feeling of good-fellowship, brought 
him an unenviable reputation. 

By 1795 the cloud of suspicion had somewhat passed over; 
he was reconciled to Mrs. Riddell, the friend whose alienation 
had most affected him, joined the Dumfriesshire Corps of Vol- 



1 6 INTRODUCTION. 

unteers, and wrote a song, " Does haughty Gaul invasion 
threat ? " which showed that he had done with French sym- 
pathies. 

But his health was failing fast. Obliged to give up his duties, 
he begged to have his whole salary continued, lest he should 
" perish of hunger." While the answer was still doubtful, he was 
threatened with imprisonment for debt, and wrote for money, in 
an agony of apprehension, to his brother, and to the publisher, Mr. 
Thomson, to whom he had freely given so many priceless poems. 
Hard upon this sad wreck of the independence he had struggled 
for followed the premature close of Burns's hfe. He died on the 
2ist of July, 1796, and was buried from the town hall of Dum- 
fries with military honors. 



BURNS. 



IN the modern arrangements of society it is no uncommon thing 
that a man of genius must, hke Butler,^ " ask for bread, and 
receive a stone ;" ^ fQr,Jn_ spite of our grand maxim of supply and 
demand, it is by no means the highest excellence that men are 
most forward to recognize. The inventor of a spinning jenny ^ 
is pretty sure of his reward in his own day ; but the writer of a 
true poem, like the apostle of a true religion, is nearly as sure of 
the contrary. We do not knjw whether it is not an aggravation 
of the injustice that there is generally a posthumous retribution. 
Robert Burns, in the course of nature, might yet have been liv- 
ing ; but his short life was spent in toil and penury, and he died 
in the prime of his manhood,* miserable and neglected. And yet 
already a brave mausoleum ^ shines over his dust, and more than 
one splendid monument has been reared in other places to his 
fame ; the street where he languished in poverty is called by his 
name ; the highest personages in our literature have been proud 

1 Samuel Butler (1612-80). His satirical poem, Hudibras, made him for 
a time very popular at court, but he died in poverty and obscurity. 

2 Compare Matt. vii. 9. 

3 The spinning jenny is a machine for spinning several threads at a time, 
invented, in 1764, by James Hargreaves, a weaver. His patent was set 
aside, however, and he died a poor man, in spite of Carlyle's assertion. 

* At the age of thirty-seven. 

5 A tin-roofed, cumbrous mausoleum in St. Michael's Churchyard, Dum- 
fries. There is another monument at Ayr, and another in the form of a 
Greek temple on the Calton Hill, Edinburgh. 
2 17 



1 8 CARLYLE. 

to appear as his commentators and admirers ; and here is the sixth 
narrative of his Hfe that has been given to the world! 

Mr. Lockhart^ thinks it necessary to apologize for this new 
attempt on such a subject ; but his readers, we believe, will readily 
acquit him ; or, at worst, will censure only the performance of his 
task, not the choice of it. The character of Burns, indeed, is a 
theme that cannot easily become either trite or exhaustedj and 
will probably gain rather than lose in its dimensions by the dis- 
tance to which it is removed by time. No m an, it ha s been said. 
i^ a^hero to his valet, and,this_js^probably true ; boi l the fault^ is 
at least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's; forjt^isxfirtain 
that to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that are notdis;^ 
tant. It is difficult for men to believe that the man, the mere mai) 
whom they see — nay, perhaps painfully feel— foiling at their side 
through the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay 
than themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of Sir 
Thomas Lucy's,^ and neighbor of John-a-Combe's,^ had snatched 
an hour or two from the preservation of his game, and written 
■us a Life of Shakespeare ! What dissertations should we not have 
had, not on " Hamlet " and " The Tempest," but on the wool 
trade,* and deer stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws ; and 
how the poacher became a player; and how Sir Thomas and 
Mr. John had Christian compassion, and did not push him to 
extremities! 

In like manner, we believe, with respect to Burns, that till the 
companions of his pilgrimage, — the honorable excise commission- 

1 John Gibson Lockhart (i 794-1854), son-in-law of Scott, and author of 
a Life of Scott, and of the Life of Robert Burns reviewed in this essay. 

2 The master of Charlecote Hall, near Stratford-upon-Avon, whose deer 
the youthful Shakespeare is said by popular tradition to have stolen. Being 
arraigned before Sir Thomas, he wrote some doggerel in revenge, which so 
kindled the knight's wrath that Shakespeare had to leave Stratford for 
London. 

3 A well-to-do burgher of Stratford, on whom Shakespeare is said to have 
written satirical rhymes. 

4 John Shakespeare, father of the poet, is said to have dealt in wool. 



BURNS. 19 

ers, and the gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt,i and the Dum- 
fries aristocracy, and all the squires and earls, equally with the Ayr 
writers ^ and the New and Old Light Clergy, ^ whom he had to do 
with, — shall have become invisible in the darkness of the past, or 
visible only by Hght borrowed from his juxtaposition, it will be 
difficult to measure him by any true standard, or to estimate what 
he really was and did, in the eighteenth century, for his country 
and the world. It will be difficult, we say, but still a fair problem 
for literary historians ; and repeated attempts will give us repeated 
approximations. 

His former biographers have done something, no doubt, but 
by no means a great deal, to assist us. Dr. Currie* and Mr. 
Walker,^ the principal of these writers, have both, we think, mis- 
taken one essentially important thing : their own and the world's 
true relation to their author, and the style in which it became such 
men to think and to speak of such a man. Dr. Currie loved the 
poet truly ; more, perhaps, than he avowed to his readers, or even 
to himself ; yet he everywhere introduces him with a certain pat- 
ronizing, apologetic air, as if the polite pubhc might think it strange 
and half unwarrantable that he, a man of science, a scholar and 
gentleman, should do such honor to a rustic. In all this, however, 
we readily admit that his fault was not want of love, but weakness 
^ faith, and regret that the first and kindest of all our poet's 

1 A society comprising the heads of the Scottish aristocracy, to whom 
Burns dedicated the Edinburgh edition of his poems, and who took one hun- 
dred copies. 

2 "Writer" is the Scottish term for a lawyer. It was a writer at Ayr 
who declared that the tearing of the contract with Jean Armour was equal to 
a divorce. 

3 "New and Old Light clergy," i.e., the liberal and the strictly Calvin- 
istic divisions of the Scottish Church. 

* Dr. James Currie, who, in 1800, prepared the first edition of Burns's 
poems that was published after his death, and realized ;^I400 for the widow 
and children. 

5 Josiah Walker, author of- the Memoir attached to the 181 1 edition of 
Burns's poems. 



20 CARLYLE. 

biographers should not have seen farther or beUeved more boldly 
what he saw. Mr. Walker offends more deeply in the same kind ; 
and both err ahke in presenting us with a detached catalogue of 
his several supposed attributes, virtues and vices, instead of a 
delineation of the resulting character as a living unity. This, 
however, is not painting a portrait, but gauging the length and 
breadth of the several features, and jotting down their dimensions 
in arithmetical ciphers. Nay, it is not so much as that ; for we 
are yet to learn by what arts or instruments the mind could be so 
measured and gauged. 

Mr. Lockhart, we are happy to say, has avoided both these 
errors. He uniformly treats Burns as the high and remarkable 
man the public voice has now pronounced him to be ; and in de- 
lineating him he has avoided the method of separate generalities, 
and rather sought for characteristic incidents, habits, actions, say- 
ings ; in a word, for aspects which exhibit the whole man as he 
looked and lived among his fellows. The book, accordingly, with 
all its deficiencies, gives more insight, we think, into the true 
character of Biuns than any prior biography; though, being 
written on the very popular and condensed scheme of an article 
for " Constable's Miscellany," i it has less depth than we could 
have wished and expected from a writer of such power, and con- 
tains rather more, and more multifarious, quotations than belong 
of right to an original production. Indeed, Mr. Lockha,rt's own 
writing is generally so good, so clear, direct, and nervous, that we 
seldom wish to see it making place for another man's. However, 
the spirit of the work is throughout candid, tolerant, and anxiously 
conciliating ; compliments and praises are liberally distributed on 
all hands to great and small ; and, as Mr. Morris Birkbeck 2 ob- 
serves of the society in the backwoods of America, " the courtesies 
of polite life are never lost sight of for a moment." But there are 
better things than these in the volume, and we can safely testify 

1 A series of cheap standard works, the publication of which was begun 
in 1825 by the well-known Edinburgh publisher, Constable. 

2 Author of a work on America, published in 1818. 



BURNS. 21 

not only that it is easily and pleasantly read a first time, but may 
even be without difficulty read again. 

Nevertheless we are far from thinking that the problem of 
Burns's biography has yet been adequately solved. We do not 
allude so much to deficiency of facts or documents — though of 
these we are still every day receiving some fresh accession — as 
to the hmited and imperfect appHcation of them to the great end 
of biography. Our notions upon this subject may perhaps appear 
extravagant ; but if an individual is really of consequence enough 
to have his life and character recorded for pubUc remembrance, 
we have always been of opinion that the public ought to be made 
acquainted with all the inward springs and relations of his char- 
acter. How did the world and man's hfe from his particular 
position represent themselves to his mind? How did coexisting 
circumstances modify him from without? how did he modify these 
from within? with what endeavors and what efficacy rule over 
them ? with what resistance and what suffering sink under them? 
In one word, what and how produced was the effect of society 
on him? what and how produced was his effect on society? He 
who should answer these questions in regard to any individual 
would, as we believe, furnish a model of perfection in biography. 
Few individuals, indeed, can deserve such a study ; and many 
hves will be written — and for the gratification of innocent curiosity 
ought to be written — and read and forgotten which are not in 
this sense biographies. But Burns, if we mistake not, is one of 
these few individuals ; and such a study, at least with such a re- 
sult, he has not yet obtained. Our own contributions to it, we 
are aware, can be but scanty and feeble ; but we offer them with 
good will, and trust they may meet with acceptance from those 
they are intended for. 



BURNS first came upon the world as a prodigy, and was in 
that character entertained by it, in the usual fashion, with 
loud, vague, tumultuous wonder, speedily subsiding into censure 



2 2 CARLYLE. 

and neglect, till his early and most mournful death again awakened 
an enthusiasm for him which, especially as there was now nothing 
to be done and much to be spoken, has prolonged itself even to 
our own time. It is true the " nine days " ^ have long since elapsed, 
and the very continuance of this clamor proves that Burns was 
no vulgar wonder. Accordingly, even in sober judgments, where, 
as years passed by, he has come to rest more and more exclu- 
sively on his own intrinsic merits, and may now be well-nigh shorn 
of that casual radiance, he appears not only as a true British poet, 
but as one of the most considerable British men of the eighteenth 
century. Let it not be objected that he did little. He did much 
if we consider where and how. If the work performed was small 
we must remember that he had his very materials to discover ; for 
the metal he worked in lay hid under the desert moor, where no 
eye but his had guessed its existence ; and we may almost say that 
with his own hand he had to construct the tools for fashioning it. 
For he found himself in deepest obscurity, without help, without 
instruction, without model— or with models only of the meanest 
sort. An educated man stands, as it were, in the midst of a 
boundless arsenal and magazine, filled with all the weapons and 
engines which man's skill has been able to devise from the earlie&t 
time ; and he works, accordingly, with a strength borrowed from 
all past ages. How different is his state who stands on the out- 
side of that storehouse, and feels that its gates must be stormed, 
or remain forever shut against him! His means are the com- 
monest and rudest ; the mere work done is no measure of his 
strength. A dwarf behind his steam engine may remove moun- 
tains ; but no dwarf will hew them down with a pickax, and he 
must be a Titan 2 that hurls them abroad with his arms. 

It is in this last shape that Burns presents himself. Born in an 
age the most prosaic Britain had yet seen, and in a condition the 

1 " Nine days' wonder " is the popular expression for a short-lived fame. 

2 In Greek mythology the Titans were the twelve giants born of Earth 
(Gaia) and Heaven (Uranus). Being hurled from the heavens by Zeus, they 
vainly tried to scale them by heaping one mountain upon another. 



BURNS. 23 

most disadvantageous, where his mind, if it accomphshed aught, 
must accomphsh it under the pressure of continual bodily toil, 
nay, of penury and desponding apprehension of the worst evils, 
and with no furtherance but such knowledge as dwells in a poor 
man's hut, and the rhymes of a Fergusson 1 or Ramsay 2 for his 
standard of beauty, he sinks not under all these impediments. 
Through the fogs and darkness of that obscure region his lynx 
eye discerns the true relations of the world and human life ; he 
grows into intellectual strength and trains himself into intellectual 
expertness. Impelled by the expansive movement of his own 
irrepressible soul, he struggles forward into the general view, and 
with haughty modesty lays down before us, as the fruit of his labor, 
a gift which Time has now pronounced imperishable. Add to 
all this that his darksome, drudging childhood and youth was by 
far the kindliest era of his whole Hfe, and that he died in his 
thirty-seventh year, and then ask if it be strange that his poems 
are imperfect and of small extent, or that his genius attained no 
mastery in its art! Alas! his sun shone as through a tropical 
tornado, and the pale shadow of death eclipsed it at noon! 
Shrouded in such baleful vapors, the genius of Burns was never 
seen in clear, azure splendor, enlightening the world. But some 
beams from it did by fits pierce through, and it tinted those clouds 
with rainbow and orient colors into a glory and stern grandeur 
which men silently gazed on with wonder and tears! 

We are anxious not to exaggerate, for it is exposition rather 
than admiration that our readers require of us here ; and yet to 
avoid some tendency to that side is no easy matter. We love 
Burns and we pity him, and love and pity are prone to magnify. 
Criticism, it is sometimes thought, should be a cold business. We 

1 Robert Fergusson (1751-74), a young Scottish poet of Edinburgh life, 
whose poems, though valuable for their truth and lively humor, hardly de- 
serve the warm admiration accorded them by Burns. 

2 Allan Ramsay (1686- 1758), a poet of Scottish life, and the preserver of 
many old popular Scottish songs. His most fa:mous poem, The Gentle 
Shepherd, is a coarse, but spirited and faithful, picture of peasant life. 



24 CARLYLE. 

are not so sure of this ; but, at all events, our concern with Burns 
is not exclusively that of critics. True and genial as his poetry 
must appear, it is not chiefly as a poet, but as a man, that he 
interests and affects us. He was often advised to write a tragedy. 
Time and means were not lent him for this ; but through life he 
enacted a tragedy, and one of the deepest. We question whether 
the world has since witnessed so utterly sad a scene ; whether 
Napoleon himself, left to brawl with Sir Hudson Lowe,^ and 
perish on his rock " amid the melancholy main," presented to the 
reflecting mind such a " spectacle of pity and fear " ^ as did this 
intrinsically nobler, gentler, and perhaps greater soul, wasting itself 
away in a hopeless struggle with base entanglements which coiled 
closer and closer round him, till only death opened him an outlet. 
Conquerors are a class of men with whom, for most part, the 
world could well dispense ; nor can the hard intellect, the unsym- 
pathizing loftiness, and high but selfish enthusiasm of such persons 
inspire us in general with any affection. At best it may excite 
amazement, and their fall, like that of a pyramid, will be beheld 
with a certain sadness and awe. But a true poet, a man in whose 
heart resides some effluence of wisdom, some tone of the " eter- 
nal melodies," is the most precious gift that can be bestowed on 
a generation. We see in him a freer, purer development of 
whatever is noblest in ourselves ; his life is a rich lesson to us ; 
and we mourn his death as that of a benefactor who loved and 
taught us. 

Such a gift had Nature, in her bounty, bestowed on us in 
Robert Burns ; but, with queenlike indifference, she cast it from 
her hand like a thing of no moment, and it was defaced and torn 
asunder, as an idle bauble, before we recognized it. To„t,heJll; 
starred Burns was given the power of making man's life more 

1 The British governor of the island of St. Helena, Napoleon's final place 
of exile, where annoying and petty regulations greatly exasperated the fallen 
emperor. 

2 The essential mission of tragedy, according to the Greek philosopher 
Aristotle, was to purify the soul " by exciting pity and fear." 



BURNS. 25 

venerable, but that of wisely guiding his own life was not given. 
Destiny, — for so in our ignorance we must speak, — his.iaults, the 
faults of others, proved too hard for him ; and that spirit which 
might have soared, could it but have walked, soon sank to the dust, 
its glorious faculties trodden under foot in the blossom, and died, 
we may almost say, without ever having lived. And so kind and 
warm a soul! so full of inborn riches, of love to all living and 
hf eless things ! How his heart flows out in sympathy over uni- 
versal Nature, and in her bleakest provinces discerns a beauty 
and a meaning! The " Daisy "^ falls not unheeded under his 
plowshare ; nor the ruined nest of that " wee, cowering, timorous 
beastie," 2 cast forth, after all its provident pains, to " thole the 
sleety dribble and cranreuch cauld."^ The "hoar visage" of 
winter dehghts him ; he dwells with a sad" and oft-returning fond- 
ness in these scenes of solemn desolation. But the voice of the 
tempest becomes an anthem to his ears ; he loves to walk in the 
sounding woods, for it raises his thoughts " to Him that walketh 
on the wings of the wind."* A true poet soul ; for it needs but 
to be struck, and the sound it yields will be music! But observe 
him chiefly as he mingles with his brother men. What warm, all- 
comprehending fellow-feeling! what trustful, boundless love! 
what generous exaggeration of the object loved! His rustic 
friend, his nut-brown maiden, are no longer mean and homely, 
but a hero and a queen, whom he prizes as the paragons of earth. 
The rough scenes of Scottish life, not seen by him in any Arca- 
dian ^ illusion, but in the rude contradiction, in the smoke and 
soil of a too harsh reality, are still lovely to him. Poverty is in- 

1 See the poem, To a Mountain Daisy. 

2 See the poem, To a Mouse on Turning her up in her Nest with the 
Plow, November, 1785. 

3 " Thole the sleety," etc., i.e., suffer the sleety drizzle and hoarfrost cold. 
* See Burns's Commonplace Book for April, 1783 or 1784; also, Ps. 

civ. 3. 

5 Arcadia, an inland pastoral state of ancient Greece, has in later literature 
been made the typical scene of the sentimental adventures of countless arti- 
ficial and courtly shepherds and shepherdesses. 



2 6 CARLYLE. 

deed his companion, but Love also, and Courage. The simple 
feelings, the worth, the nobleness, that dwell under the straw roof, 
are dear and venerable to his heart, and thus over the lowest 
provinces of man's existence he pours the glory of his own soul ; 
and they rise, in shadow and sunshine, softened and brightened 
into a beauty which other eyes discern not in the highest. He 
has a just self-consciousness which too often degenerates into 
pride ; yet it is a noble pride, for defense, not for offense ; no cold, 
suspicious feeling, but a frank and social one. The peasant poet 
bears himself, we might say, like a king in exile : he is cast among 
the low, and feels himself equal to the highest ; yet he claims no 
rank, that none may be disputed to him. The forward he can 
repel, the supercilious he can subdue; pretensions of wealth or 
ancestry are of no avail with him ; there is a fire in that dark eye 
under which the " insolence of condescension " cannot thrive. In 
his abasement, in his extreme need, he forgets not for a moment 
the majesty of poetry and manhood. And yet, far as he feels 
himself above common men, he wanders not apart from them, 
but mixes warmly in their interests — nay, throws himself into their 
arms, and, as it were, entreats them to love him. It is moving 
to see how in his darkest despondency this proud being still seeks 
relief from friendship ; unbosoms himself, often to the unworthy ; 
and, amid tears, strains to his glowing heart a heart that knows 
only the name of friendship. And yet he was " quick to learn," 
a man of keen vision, before whom common disguises afforded 
no concealment. His understanding saw through the hollowness 
even of accompHshed deceivers, but there was a generous credu- 
lity in his heart. And so did our peasant show himself among 
us " a soul like an seolian harp,i in whose strings the vulgar wind, 
as it passed through them, changed itself into articulate melody." 
And this was he for whom the world found no fitter business than 
quarreling with smugglers and vintners, computing excise dues 

1 An jEolian harp is a stringed instrument from which musical tones arc 
produced by a current of wind. It Avas named from yEolus, the Greek god 
of the winds. 



BURNS. 27 

upon tallow, and gauging ale barrels! ^ In such toils was that 
mighty spirit sorrowfully wasted ; and a hundred years may pass 
on before another such is given us to waste. 

All that remains of Burns,-^the writings he has left, — seems to 
us, as we hinted above, no more than a poor, mutilated fraction of 
what was in him ; brief, broken ghmpses of a genius that could 
never show itself complete, that wanted all things for complete- 
ness, — culture, leisure, true effort, nay, even length of life. His 
poems are, with scarcely any exception, mere occasional effusions, 
poured forth with little premeditation, expressing by such means 
as offered the passion, opinion, or humor of the hoiir. Never in 
one instance was it permitted him to grapple with any subject 
with the full collection of his strength, to fuse and mold it in the 
concentrated fire of his genius. To try by the strict rules of art 
such imperfect fragments woiild be at once unprofitable and 
unfair. Nevertheless there is something in these poems, marred 
and defective as they are, which forbids the most fastidious stu- 
dent of poetry to pass them by. Some sort of enduring quality 
they must have ; for, after fifty years of the wildest vicissitudes 
in poetic taste, they still continue to be read, nay, are read more 
and more eagerly, more and more extensively ; and this not only 
by literary virtuosos and that class upon whom transitory causes 
operate most strongly, but by all classes, down to the most hard, 
unlettered, and truly natural class, who read little, and especially 
no poetry, except because they find pleasure in it. The grounds 
of so singular and wide a popularity, which extends, in a literal 
sense, from the palace to the hut and over all regions where the 
English tongue is spoken, are well worth inquiring into. After 
every just deduction, it seems to imply some rare excellence in 
these works. What is that excellence? 

To answer this question will not lead us far. The excellence 

1 As an exciseman, Burns's business was to levy the excise, — an English 
tax upon articles for home consumption,— and as far as possible to prevent 
smuggling. 



28 CARLYLE. 

of Burns is, indeed, among the rarest, whether in poetry or prose ; 
but, at the same time, it is plain and easily recognized, — his sin- 
cerity, his indisputable air of truth. Here are no fabulous woes 
or joys ; no hollow, fantastic sentimentalities ; no wiredrawn re- 
finings, either in thought or feeling. The passion that is traced 
before us has glowed in a living heart ; the opinion he utters has 
risen in his own understanding and been a hght to his own steps. 
He does not write from hearsay, but from sight and experience ; 
it is the scenes that he has Uved and labored amidst that he de- 
scribes. Those scenes, rude and humble as they are, have kindled 
beautiful emotions in his soul, noble thoughts and definite resolves ; 
and he speaks forth what is in him not from any outward call of 
vanity or interest, but because his heart is too full to be silent. 
He speaks it with such melody and modulation as he can, "in 
homely, rustic jingle;" but it is his own, and genuine. This is 
the grand secret for finding readers and retaining them : let him 
who would move and convince others be first moved and con- 
vinced himself. Horace's rule, "Si vis me flere" i is applicable in 
a wider sense than the literal one. To every poet, to every writer, 
we might say, " Be true if you would be beHeved." Let a man 
but speak forth with genuine earnestness the thought, the emotion, 
the actual condition of his own heart, and other men — so strangely 
are we all knit together by the tie of sympathy— must and will 
give heed to him. In culture, in extent of view, we may stand 
above the speaker or below him ; but in either case his words, if 
they are earnest and sincere, will find some response within us ; 
for, in spite of all casual varieties in outward rank or inward, as 
face answers to face, so does the heart of man to man. 

This may appear a very simple principle, and one which Burns 
had little merit in discovering. True, the discovery is easy 
enough ; but the practical appKance is not easy,— is, indeed, the 
fundamental difficulty which all poets have to strive with, and 
which scarcely one in a hundred ever fairly surmounts. A head 

1 "Si vis me flere, dolendum estprinnim ipsi tibi" ("If you wish me to weep, 
your own heart must first be wrung"). — Ars Poetica, line I02. 



BURNS. 29 

too dull to discriminate the true from the false, a heart too dull 
to love the one at all risks and to hate the other in spite of all 
temptations, are alike fatal to a writer. With either, or, as more 
commonly happens, with both, of these deficiencies, combine a 
love of distinction, a wish to be original, which is seldom wanting, 
and we have Affectation, the bane of literature, as Cant, its elder 
brother, is of morals. How often does the one and the other 
front us, in poetry as in life! Great poets themselves are not 
always free of this vice ; nay, it is precisely on a certain sort and 
degree of greatness that it is most commonly ingrafted. A strong 
effort after excellence will sometimes solace itself with a mere 
shadow of success ; he who has much to unfold will sometimes 
unfold it imperfectly. Byron,^ for instance, was no common 
man ; yet, if we examine his poetry with this view, we shall find 
it far enough from faultless. Generally speaking, we should say 
that it is not true. He refreshes us not with the divine fountain, 
but too often with vulgar, strong waters, stimulating, indeed, to 
the taste, but soon ending in dislike, or even nausea. Are his 
Harolds and Giaours,^ we would ask, real men, — we mean poetic- 
ally consistent and conceivable men? Do not these characters — 
does not the character of their author, which more or less shines 
through them all — rather appear a thing put on for the occasion ; 
no natural or possible mode of being, but something intended 
to look much grander than nature? Surely all these stormful 
agonies, this volcanic heroism, superhuman contempt, and moody 
desperation, with so much scowling and teeth-gnashing and 
other sulphurous humor, is more like the brawling of a player in 
some paltry tragedy which is to last three hours, than the bearing 
of a man in the business of life, which is to last threescore and 

1 George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788- 1821), one of the greatest English 
poets of the nineteenth century. 

2 The Giaour and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, like all the other narrative 
poems of Byron, show us, in varying costumes, the melancholy, affected, but 
" splendid and puissant " personality of the poet himself, involved in improb- 
able, but daring and vividly pictured, adventures. 



30 CARLYLE. 

ten years. To our minds there is a taint of this sort, something 
which we should call theatrical, false, affected, in every one of 
these otherwise so powerful pieces. Perhaps " Don Juan," ^ es- 
pecially the latter parts of it, is the only thing approaching to a 
sincere work he ever wrote ; the only work where he showed 
himself in any measure as he was, and seemed so intent on his 
subject as, for moments, to forget himself. Yet Byron hated this 
vice, — we beheve, heartily detested it ; nay, he had declared formal 
war against it in words. So difficult is it even for the strongest 
to make this primary attainment, which might seem the simplest 
of all, — to read its own consciousness without mistakes, without 
errors involuntary or willful! We recollect no poet of Burns's 
susceptibility who comes before us from the first, and abides with 
us to the last, with such a total want of affectation. He is an 
honest man and an honest writer. In his successes and his fail- 
ures, in his greatness and his littleness, he is ever clear, simple, 
true, and ghtters with no luster but his own. We reckon this to 
be a great virtue ; to be, in fact, the root of most other virtues, 
literary as well as moral. 

Here, however, let us say, it is to the poetry of Bums that we 
now allude; to those writings which he had time to meditate, 
and where no special reason existed to warp his critical feeling 
or obstruct his endeavor to fulfill it. Certain of his letters and 
other fractions of prose composition by no means deserve this 
praise. Here, doubtless, there is not the same natural truth of 
style, but, on the contrary, something not only stiff, but strained 
and twisted ; a certain high-flown, inflated tone, the stilting em- 
phasis of which contrasts ill with the firmness and rugged simplic- 
ity of even his poorest verses. Thus no man, it would appear, 
is altogether unaffected. Does not Shakespeare himself some- 
times premeditate the sheerest bombast! But, even with regard 
to these letters of Burns, it is but fair to state that he had two 

1 Byron's last long poem, left unfinished at his death. The scene of the 
latter part is laid in English society, and the cynicism of the early poems has 
in this become matured and less affected, but intensified. 



BURNS. 31 

excuses. The first was his comparative deficiency in language. 
Burns, though for most part he writes with singular force and 
even gracefulness, is not master of English prose as he is of 
Scottish verse ; not master of it, we mean, in proportion to the 
depth and vehemence of his matter. These letters strike us as 
the effort of a man to express something which he has no organ 
fit for expressing. But a second and weightier excuse is to be 
found in the peculiarity of Burns's social rank. His correspond- 
ents are often men whose relation to him he has never accurately 
ascertained ; whom, therefore, he is either forearming himself 
against or else unconsciously flattering by adopting the style he 
thinks will please them. At all events, we should remember that 
these faults, even in his letters, are not the rule, but the excep- 
tion. Whenever he writes — as one would ever wish to do — to 
trusted friends and on real interests, his style becomes simple, 
vigorous, expressive, sometimes even beautiful. His letters to 
Mrs. Dunlop ^ are uniformly excellent. 

But we return to his poetry. In addition to its sincerity, it 
has another peculiar merit which, indeed, is but a mode, or per- 
haps a means, of the foregoing. This displays itself in his choice 
of subjects, or rather in his indifference as to subjects, and the 
power he has of making all subjects interesting. The ordinary 
poet, like the ordinary man, is forever seeking in external circum- 
stances the help which can be found only in himself. In what 
is familiar and near at hand he discerns no form or comehness ; 
home is not poetical, but prosaic ; it is in some past, distant, con- 
ventional, heroic world that poetry resides ; were he there and 
not here, were he thus and not so, it would be well with him. 
Hence our innumerable host of rose-colored novels and iron- 
mailed epics, with their locahty not on the earth, but somewhere 
nearer to the moon; hence our virgins of the sun and our 
knights of the cross, malicious Saracens in turbans and copper- 

1 A descendant of William Wallace, who, meeting, in 1786, with The Cot- 
ter's Saturday Night, at once sent to Burns for half a dozen copies of his 
poems, and opened with him a lifelong correspondence. 



32 CARLYLE. 

colored chiefs in wampum/ and so many other truculent figures 
from the heroic times or the heroic climates, who on all hands 
swarm in our poetry. Peace be with them ! But yet, as a great 
moralist proposed preaching to the men of this century, so would 
we fain preach to the poets, " a sermon on the duty of staying at 
home." Let them be sure that heroic ages and heroic climates 
can do little for them. That form of hfe has attraction for us 
less because it is better or nobler than our own -than simply be- 
cause it is different ; and even this attraction must be of the most 
transient sort. For will not our own age one day be an ancient 
one, and have as quaint a costume as the rest; not contrasted 
with the rest, therefore, but ranked along with them in respect of 
quaintness? Does Homer 2 interest us now because he wrote of 
what passed beyond his native Greece and two centuries before 
he was born, or because he wrote what passed in God's world 
and in the heart of man which is the same after thirty centuries? 
Let our poets look to this : is their feeling really finer, truer, and 
their vision deeper, than that of other men, they have nothing to 
fear, even from the humblest subject; is it not so, they have 
nothing to hope but an ephemeral favor, even from the highest. 
The poet, we imagine, can never have far to seek for a sub- 
ject ; the elements of his art are in him and around him on every 
hand. For him the ideal world is not remote from the actual, 
but under it and within it ; nay, he is a poet precisely because he 
can discern it there. Wherever there is a sky above him and a 
world around him, the poet is in his place ; for here, too, is man's 
existence, with its infinite longings and small acquirings, its ever- 
thwarted, ever-renewed endeavors, its unspeakable aspirations, 

1 See the works of Byron, Moore, Scott, Southey, and other romancers of 
the time. The knights of the cross and the Saracens were the main charac- 
ters of Scott's Talisman, published in 1825, and the Indian chief is a favorite 
hero of the American, James Fenimore Cooper, and figures also in Campbell's 
Gertrude of Wyoming. 

2 Carlyle read Homer for the first time, and with great interest, at Craigen- 
puttoch. 



BURNS. 33 

its fears and hopes that wander through eternity, and all the 
mystery of brightness and of gloom that it was ever made of, in 
any age or climate, since man first began to Hve. Is there not 
the fifth act of a tragedy in every deathbed, though it were a 
peasant's and a bed of heath? And are wooings and weddings 
obsolete, that there can be comedy no longer? Or are men sud- 
denly grown wise, that Laughter must no longer shake his sides, 
but be cheated of his farce? Man's life and nature is as it was 
and as it will ever be. But the poet must have an eye to read 
these things, and a heart to understand them, or they come and 
pass away before him in vain. He is a vates^ a seer ; a gift of 
vision has been given him. Has life no meanings for him which 
another cannot equally decipher? Then he is no poet, and Del- 
phi 2 itself will not make him one. 

In this respect Burns, though not, perhaps, absolutely a great 
poet, better manifests his capability, better proves the truth of 
his genius, than if he had by his own strength kept the whole 
Minerva Press ^ ^oing to the end of his literary course. He 
shows himself at least a poet of Nature's own making ; and Na- 
ture, after all, is still the grand agent in making poets. We often 
hear of this and the other external condition being requisite for 
the existence of a poet. Sometimes it is a certain sort of train- 
ing; he must have studied certain things, — studied, for instance, 
" the elder dramatists," * and so learned a poetic language ; as if 
poetry lay in the tongue, not in the heart! At other times we 
are told he must be bred in a certain rank, and must be on a 
confidential footing with the higher classes ; because, above all 

1 A Latin word meaning " poet " or " prophet." 

2 The ancient oracle of ApoHo in Phocis, Greece. The oracular sayings, 
supposed to be inspired by vapor rising from a hole in the ground, were al- 
ways delivered in poetry. 

3 A printing establishment in Leadenhall Street, London, which early in 
the century issued novels full of affected and pernicious sentimentalism. 

* That group of dramatists (Marlowe, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and 
Fletcher, etc.) who, with Shakespeare at their head, made the reigns of Eliza- 
beth and James I. the golden age of English poetic drama. 
3 



34 CARLYLE. 

things, he must see the world. As to seeing the world, we ap- 
prehend this will cause him little difficulty, if he have but eyesight 
to see it with. Without eyesight, indeed, the task might be hard. 
The bhnd or the purblind man " travels from Dan to Beersheba ^ 
and finds it all barren." But, happily, every poet is born in the 
world and sees it, with or against his will, every day and every 
hour he lives. The mysterious workmanship of man's heart, the 
true light and the inscrutable darkness of man's destiny, reveal 
themselves not only in capital cities and crowded saloons, but in 
every hut and hamlet where men have their abode. Nay ; do 
not the elements of all human virtues and all human vices, the 
passions at once of a Borgia ^ and of a Luther,^ He written, in 
stronger or fainter lines, in the consciousness of every individual 
bosom that has practiced honest self-examination? Truly, this 
same world may be seen in Mossgiel ^ and Tarbolton,^ if we look 
well, as clearly as it ever came to light in Crockford's ^ or the 
Tuileries '^ itself. 

But sometimes still harder requisitions are laid on the poor as- 
pirant to poetry ; for it is hinted that he should have been born 

1 " From Dan to Beersheba" is a scriptural expression meaning from one 
end of the kingdom to the other ; all over the world. Dan was the most 
northern, and Beersheba the most southern, city of Palestine. 

2 A Spanish family which, during the fifteenth century, attained a ' ' bad 
eminence " in Italy. The members most famous for evil and murderous pas- 
sions were the Pope Alexander VI., and his children, Csesar and Lucrezia. 

3 Martin Luther (1483- 1546), the German monk whose passionate protest 
against the sale of indulgences grew into opposition to the papal supremacy, 
and brought about the Protestant Reformation. 

* The farm where Burns spent the greater part of his life. 

5 A small town in Ayr County, Scotland. 

6 A famous and fashionable gambling club existing in London from 1827 
to 1844. It was named after the proprietor, who became a millionaire at the 
cost of numberless ruined families. 

T A royal palace in Paris, connected with the Louvre, begun by Catherine 
de' Medici in 1564, and burned by the Commune in 1871. After 1789, when 
Louis XVI. was forced to move to it from Versailles, it was the chief royal 
residence. 



BURNS. 35 

two centuries ago, inasmuch as poetry about that date vanished 
from the earth and became no longer attainable by men! Such 
cobweb speculations have, now and then, overhung the field of 
literature ; but they obstruct not the growth of any plant there. 
The Shakespeare or the Burns, unconsciously and merely as he 
walks onward, silently brushes them away. Is not every genius 
an impossibility till he appear? Why do we call him new and 
original if we saw where his marble was lying and what fabric he 
could rear from it? It is not the material but the workman 
that is wanting. It is not the dark place that hinders, but the 
dim eye. A Scottish peasant's life was the meanest and rudest 
of all lives till Burns became a poet in it and a poet of it ; found 
it a man's hfe, and therefore significant to men. A thousand bat- 
tlefields remain unsung, but the " Wounded Hare " ^ has not per- 
ished without its memorial. A balm of mercy yet breathes on 
us from its dumb agonies, because a poet was there. Our Hal- 
loween 2 had passed and repassed in rude awe and laughter since 
the era of the druids,^ but no Theocritus * till Burns discerned in 
it the materials of a Scottish idyl. Neither was the " Holy Fair " -^ 
any Council of Trent ^ or Roman Jubilee, ''' but, nevertheless, Su- 
perstition s and Hypocrisy ^ and Fun ^ having been propitious to 

1 See poem, On Seeing a Wounded Hare Limp by Mc. 

2 The night before the feast of Allhallows or All Saints, the ist of Novem- 
ber. See Burns's poem of that name for the traditions and spells of that night. 

3 The priests of the Celtic inhabitants of Gaul and Britain, from whose 
mystic rites of divination many of the ceremonies of Halloween are probably 
derived. 

* The greatest of the Greek pastoral poets, noted for his Idyllia, or pictures 
of actual life. He lived in Alexandria in the third century B.C. 

5 The term used in the west of Scotland for a sacramental occasion. 

6 The most celebrated of the ecumenical, or general, councils of the Roman 
Catholic Church, which was held at Trent, a city of the Tyrol, to decide on points 
at issue with the Reformers of the sixteenth century. 

7 A period recurring once in twenty-iive years in the Roman Catholic 
Church, marked by indulgences granted by the Pope. 

8 Mythical personages whom Burns represents as inviting him to the Holy 
Fair. 



3^ CARLYLE. 

him, in this man's hand it became a poem instinct with satire 
and genuine comic hfe. Let but the true poet be given us, — we 
repeat it, — place him where and how you will, and true poetry will 
not be wanting. 

Independently of the essential gift of poetic feeling, as we 
have now attempted to describe it, a certain rugged, sterling 
worth pervades whatever Burns has written ; a virtue, as of green 
fields and mountain breezes, dwells in his poetry; it is redolent 
of natural life and hardy, natural men. There is a decisive 
strength in him, and yet a sweet, native gracefulness. He is 
tender, he is vehement, yet without constraint or too^ visible ef- 
fort ; he melts the heart or inflames it with a power which seems 
habitual and familiar to him. We see that in this man there was 
the gentleness, the trembling pity of a woman, with the deep 
earnestness, the force and passionate ardor of a hero. Tears lie 
in him, and consuming fire, as lightning lurks in the drops of the 
summer cloud. He has a resonance in his bosom for every note 
of human feeling ; the high and the low, the sad, the ludicrous, 
the joyful, are welcome in their turn to his " lightly moved and 
all-conceiving spirit." 

And observe with what a fierce, prompt force he grasps 
his subject, be it what it may! How he fixes, as it were, the 
full image of the matter in his eye, full and clear in every 
lineament, and catches the real type and essence of it amid 
a thousand accidents and superficial circumstances, no one of 
which misleads him! Is it of reason, — some truth to be dis- 
covered? No sophistry, no vain surface logic, detains him. 
Quick, resolute, unerring, he pierces through into the marrow of 
the question, and speaks his verdict with an emphasis that cannot 
be forgotten. Is it of description, — some visual object to be rep- 
resented? No poet of any age or nation is more graphic than 
Burns. The characteristic features disclose themselves to him at 
a glance. Three lines from his hand, and we have a Hkeness, 
and, in that rough dialect, in that rude, often awkward meter, so 
clear and definite a likeness ! It seems a draughtsman working 



BURNS. 37 

with a burnt stick ; and yet the burin i of a Retzsch 2 is not more 
expressive or exact. 

Of this last excellence, the plainest and most comprehensive 
of all, being, indeed, the root and foundation of every sort of 
talent, poetical or intellectual, we could produce innumerable in- 
stances from the writings of Burns. Take these ghmpses of a 
snowstorm from his " Winter Night " (the italics are ours) : 

" When biting Boreas, 3 fell* and (ioure,5 
Sharp shivers thro' the leafless bow'r, 
And Phcebus 6 gies 7 a short-lived glower. 

Far south the lift,^ 
Dim-dark'' ning thro' the flaky show'r. 

Or whirling drift: 

" Ae 9 night the storm the steeples rock'd. 
Poor labor sweet in sleep was lock'd, 
While burns wV snawy 10 wreeths upchok'd 

Wild-eddying S7<jirl, 
Or thro' the mining outlet bock'd H 
Down headlong hurl." 

Are there not "descriptive touches" here? The describer saw 
this thing, — the essential feature and true likeness of every cir- 
cumstance in it ; saw, and not with the eye only. " Poor labor 
locked in sweet sleep;" the dead stillness of man, unconscious, 
vanquished, yet not unprotected, while such strife of the material 
elements rages and seems to reign supreme in loneliness. This 
is of the heart as well as of the eye ! Look also at his image of 
a thaw, and prophesied fall of the " Auld Brig : " 12 

1 An engraver's tool. 

2 Friedrich August Moritz Retzsch (1779- 1857), an eminent artist, best 
known for his engravings illustrative of the works of Goethe, Schiller, and 
Shakespeare. 3 xhe Greek god of the north wind. 

* Fierce ; keen. 5 Stubborn. 6 Apollo, the Greek sun god. 

7 Gives. 8 Sky. 9 One. 10 Snowy. " Vomited. 

12 See the poem. The Brigs of Ayr, written on the erection, in 1788, of the 
New Brig (bridge) in the town of Ayr, across the river of the same name. 
This passage, in which the Auld Brig prophesies the fall of the less bulky 
New Brig, Carlyle by an oversight quotes as an address to the Auld Brig. 



38 CARL YLE. 

" When heavy, dark, continued, a'-day rains 
Wi' deepening deluges o'erflow the plains ; 
When from the hills where springs the brawling Coil,l 
Or stately Lugar's i mossy fountains boil, 
Or where the Greenock ^ winds his moorland course, 
Or haunted Garpal l draws his feeble source, 
Arous'd by blust'ring winds and spotting thowes,2 
In mony^ a tojTent down his snaw-broo'^ rowes,^ 
While crashing ice, borne on the roaring spate,^ 
Szveeps dams and mills and brigs'^ a' 8 to the gate;^ 
And, from Glenbucki" down to the Rattonkey,il 
Auld Ayr is just one lengthen'd tumbling sea ; 
Then down ye'U hurl, deil,i2 nor ye never rise! 
And dash the giimlie jaups'^^ tip to the pouring skies." 

The last line is in itself a Poussin ^^ picture of that deluge! The 
welkin has, as it were, bent down with its weight ; the " gumhe 
jaups " and the " pouring skies " are mingled together ; it is a 
world of rain and ruin. In respect of mere clearness and mi- 
nute fidelity, the Farmer's commendation of his "auld mare" in 
plow or in cart may vie with Homer's Smithy of the Cyclops,!^ 
or yoking of Priam's Chariot.^'' Nor have we forgotten stout 
" Burn-the-wind " i^ and his brawny customers, inspired by " Scotch 
Drink." But it is needless to multiply examples. One other 
trait of a much finer sort we select from multitudes of such 

1 Tributaries of the Ayr. The "haunted Garpal," Burns says in a note, 
" is one of the few places in the west of Scotland where those fancy-scaring 
beings, . . . ghaists, still . . . inhabit." Carlyle, in a footnote, parallels 
the phrase with the " fabulosiis Hydaspes " (" storied Hydaspes ") of Horace 
(see Book I. Ode XXII.). 

2 Thaws. 3 Many. * Water. 5 Rolls. 
6 Flood. 7 Bridges. 8 All. » Road. 

10 BuRNs's Note. — The source of the river Ayr. 

11 BuRNs's Note. — A small landing place above the large quay. 

12 Devil. 13 " Gumlie jaups," i.e., muddy splashes. 

1* Nicolas Poussin (1594- 1665), a celebrated French painter. His chief 
works are rather gloomy landscapes with classical figures. 

15 See Homer's Iliad, Book XVIII. 

16 See Iliad, Book XXIV. 

1'' A Scotch term for a blacksmith (see poem, Scotch Drink). 



BURNS. 39 

among his " Songs." It gives in a single line to the saddest feel- 
ing the saddest environment and local habitation : 

" The pale Moon is setting beyond the white wave. 
And Time is setting wV me, O; 
Farewell, false friends! false lover, farewell! 
I'll nae mairl trouble them nor thee, O." 

This clearness of sight we have called the foundation of all 
talent ; for, in fact, unless we see our object, how shall we know 
how to place or prize it in our understanding, our imagination, 
our affections? Yet it is not in itself, perhaps, a very high excel- 
lence, but capable of being united indifferently with the strongest 
or with ordinary power. Homer surpasses all men in this qual- 
ity ; but, strangely enough, at no great distance below him are 
Richardson ^ and Defoe.^ It belongs, in truth, to what is called 
a lively mind, and gives no sure indication of the higher endow- 
ments that may exist along with it. In all the three cases we 
have mentioned, it is combined with great garruHty. Their de- 
scriptions are detailed, ample, and lovingly exact. Homer's fire 
bursts through from time to time, as if by accident, but Defoe 
and Richardson have no fire. Burns, again, is not more distin- 
guished by the clearness than by the impetuous force of his con- 
ceptions. Of the strength, the piercing emphasis with which he 
thought, his emphasis of expression may give a humble, but the 
readiest, proof. Who ever uttered sharper sayings than his, — 
words more memorable, now by their burning vehemence, now 
by their cool vigor and laconic pith? A single phrase depicts a 
whole subject, a whole scene. We hear of "a gentleman that 
derived his patent of nobihty direct from Almighty God." Our 

1 " Nae mair," i.e., no more. 

2 Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), " father " of the modern English novel. 
His works, Pamela, Clarissa Harlowe, and Sir Charles Grandison, are 
remarkable for their length and minute detail. 

3 Daniel Defoe (1661-1731), a voluminous writer of pamphlets and works 
of fiction, unexcelled for the picturing of imaginary events in the colors of 
truth. His best-known production is Robinson Crusoe. 



40 CARLYLE. 

Scottish forefathers in the battlefield struggled forward "red-wat- 
shod,"i — in this one word a full vision of horror and carnage, per- 
haps too frightfully accurate for art! 

In fact, one of the leading features in the mind of Burns is 
this vigor of his strictly intellectual perceptions. A resolute force 
is ever visible in his judgments and in his feelings and volitions. 
Professor Stewart ^ says of him, with some surprise : " All the 
faculties of Burns's mind were, as far as I could judge, equally 
vigorous ; and his predilection for poetry was rather the result of 
his own enthusiastic and impassioned temper than of a genius 
exclusively adapted to that species of composition. From his 
conversation I should have pronounced him to be fitted to excel 
in whatever walk of ambition he had chosen to exert his abilities." 
But this, if we mistake not, is at all times the very essence of a 
truly poetical endowment. Poetry, except in such cases as that 
of Keats,^ where the whole consists in a weak-eyed, matfdlin 
sensibility, and a certain vague, random tunefulness of nature, is 
no separate faculty, no organ which can be superadded to the 
rest or disjoined from them ; but rather the result of their general 
harmony and completion. The feelings, the gifts, that exist in 
the poet are those that exist, with more or less development, in 
every human soul ; the imagination which shudders at the hell of 
Dante * is the same faculty, weaker in degree, which called that 
picture into being. How does the poet speak to men with power 
but by being still more a man than they ? Shakespeare, it has 
been well observed, in the planning and completing of his trag- 
edies, has shown an understanding, were it nothing more, which 

1 With shoes wet with blood. 

2 Dugald Stewart (1753 -1 828), a Scotch philosophical writer, and for some 
time professor of moral philosophy at Edinburgh. 

3 John Keats (1796- 1821), author of Endymion, Hyperion, and some of the 
noblest odes in English. Carlyle's contemptuous estimate of him is mislead- 
ing. Matthew Arnold ranked him as " by his promise, at any rate, . . . one 
of the very greatest of English poets." 

* In the Inferno, or first part of Dante's Divina Commedia, he represents 
himself as led by Virgil to behold the tortures of the damned. 



BURNS. 41 

might have governed states or indited a " Novum Organum." ^ 
What Burns's force of understanding may have been we have less 
means of judging. It had to dwell among the humblest objects ; 
never saw philosophy ; never rose, except by natural effort and 
for short intervals, into the region of great ideas. Nevertheless 
sufficient indication, if no proof sufficient, remains for us in his 
works. We discern the brawny movements of a gigantic though 
untutored strength, and can understand how in conversation his 
quick, sure insight into men and things may, as much as aught 
else about him, have amazed the best thinkers of his time and 
country. 

But, unless we mistake, the intellectual gift of Burns is fine as 
well as strong. The more delicate relations of things could not 
well have escaped his eye, for they were intimately present to his 
heart. The logic of the senate and the forum is indispensable, 
but not all-sufficient ; nay, perhaps the highest truth is that which 
will the most certainly elude it. For this logic works by words, 
and " the highest," it has been said, " cannot be expressed in 
words." We are not without tokens of an openness for this 
higher truth also, of a keen though uncultivated sense for it hav- 
ing existed in Burns. Mr. Stewart, it will be remembered, won- 
ders, in the passage above quoted, that Burns had formed some 
distinct conception of the " doctrine of association." ^ We 
rather think that far subtler things than the doctrine of associa- 
tion had from of old been familiar to him. Here, for instance : 

" We know nothing," thus writes he, " or next to nothing, of 
the structure of oiu- souls, so we cannot account for those seem- 
ing caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with 
this thing, or struck with that, which on minds of a different cast 
makes no extraordinary impression, I have some favorite flowers 

1 Literally " the new instrument," the great treatise on the new logic, or 
inductive method of reasoning, by Francis Bacon, Lord Verulam, printed in 
1620. 

2 The doctrine treating of that connection between ideas by virtue of which 
they succeed each other spontaneously in the mind. 



42 CARLYLE. 

in spring, among which are the mountain daisy, the harebell, the 
foxglove, the wild-brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary 
hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I 
never hear the loud, solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer 
noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an 
autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul hke the 
enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to 
what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery which, 
like the seolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing 
accident? or do these workings argue something within us above 
the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those 
awful and important realities : a God that made all things, man's 
immaterial and immortal nature, and a world of weal or woe be- 
yond death and the grave." 

Force and fineness of understanding are often spoken of as 
something different from general force and fineness of nature, as 
something partly independent of them. The necessities of lan- 
guage so require it ; but in truth these qualities are not distinct 
and independent ; except in special cases and from special causes, 
they ever go together.' A man of strong understanding is gener- 
ally a man of strong character ; neither is delicacy in the one kind 
often divided from delicacy in the other. No one, at all events, 
is ignorant that in the poetry of Burns keenness of insight keeps 
pace with keenness of feeling ; that his light is not more pervading 
than his warmth. He is a man of the most impassioned temper, 
with passions not strong only, but noble, and of the sort in which 
great virtues and great poems take their rise. It is reverence, 
it is love toward all nature that inspires him, that opens his eyes 
to its beauty, and makes heart and voice eloquent in its praise. 
There is a true old saying that "love furthers knowledge;" but, 
above all, it is the living essence of that knowledge which makes 
poets; the first principle of its existence, increase, activity. Of 
Burns's fervid affection, his generous, all-embracing love, we have 
spoken already, as of the grand distinction of his nature, seen 
equally in word and deed, in his life and in his writings. It were 



BURNS. 43 

easy to multiply examples. Not man only, but all that environs 
man in the material and moral universe, is lovely in his sight. 
The " hoary hawthorn," the " troop of gray plover," the " solitary 
curlew," — all are dear to him ; all live in this earth along with him, 
and to all he is knit as in mysterious brotherhood. How touch- 
ing is it, for instance, that, amidst the gloom of personal misery, 
brooding over the wintry desolation without him and within him, 
he thinks of the "ourie^ cattle" and " silly ^ sheep," and their 
sufferings in the pitiless storm! 

" I thought me on the ourie cattle, 

Or silly sheep, wha^ bide this brattle* 

O' wintry war, 
And thro' the drift, deep-lairing, ^ sprattle^ 

Beneath a scar.'? 
Ilk 8 happing 9 bird, wee helpless thing! 
That in the merry months o' spring 
Delighted me to hear thee sing, 

What comes o' thee? 
Where wilt thou cow'r thy chittering i" wing 

And close thy ee? " n 

The tenant of the mean hut, with its "ragged roof and chinky 
wall," has a heart to pity even these. This is worth several 
homilies on mercy, for it is the voice of Mercy herself. Burns, 
indeed, Hves in sympathy ; his soul rushes forth into all realms of 
being ; nothing that has existence can be indifferent to fiim. The 
very devil he cannot hate with right orthodoxy : 

" But fare you weel, auld Nickie-ben;i2 
O, wad 13 ye tak' a thought and men' ! i* 
Ye aiblins 15 might— I dinna ken 16_ 

1 Shivering. " Simple ; innocent. 3 Who. * A brief contest. 

5 Deep-wading. ^ Struggle. 7 Protruding rock. 

8 Each. 9 Hopping. l" Trembling with cold. 

11 Eye. The extract is from A Winter Night. 

12 The devil is popularly called " Old Nick," from the nix, or nick, in 
Northern mythology, an evil spirit of the waters. 13 Would. 

1* Mend. 15 Perhaps. 16 " Dinna ken," i.e., do not know. 



44 CARLYLE. 

Still hae l a stake ; 
I'm wae2 to think upo' yon den, 
Ev'n for your sake! "3 

" He is the father of curses and lies," said Dr. Slop,* " and is 
cursed and damned already." " I am sorry for it," quoth my 
Uncle Toby.s A poet without love were a physical and meta- 
physical impossibihty. 

But has it not been said, in contradiction to this principle, that 
" indignation makes verses ? " ^ It has been so said, and is true 
enough ; but the contradiction is apparent, not real. The indig- 
nation which makes verses is, properly speaking, an inverted love ; 
the love of some right, some worth, some goodness, belonging to 
ourselves or others, which has been injured, and which this tem- 
pestuous feehng issues forth to defend and avenge. No selfish 
fury of heart, existing there as a primary feeling and without its 
opposite, ever produced much poetry ; otherwise, we suppose, the 
tiger were the most musical of all our choristers. Johnson '^ said 
he loved a good hater ;^ by which he must have meant not so 
much one that hated violently as one that hated wisely, hated 
baseness from love of nobleness. However, in spite of Johnson's 
paradox, tolerable enough for once in speech, but which need not 

1 Have. 2 Unhappy. 

3 An extract from Address to the Deil. 

4 A morose physician in Sterne's novel, Tristram Shandy. 

5 The hero of Tristram Shandy, called by Hazlitt ' ' one of the finest com- 
pliments ever paid to human nature, . . . the most unoffending of God's 
creatures." 

6 A translation of the Latin " facit indignatio verstis" of -Juvenal, a 
Roman satirist. 

"^ Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-84), author of Rasselas, The Rambler, 
The Idler, Lives of the Poets, and a Dictionary, together with many other 
works in poetry and prose, was the most impressive literary figure of his time, 
but is best known by his conversations, recorded in Boswell's Life of Johnson, 
and elsewhere. 

8 His words were : " Dear Bathurst was a man to my very heart's content. 
He hated a fool, and he hated a rogue, and he hated a Whig ; he was a very 
good hater " (see Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes of Dr. Johnson). 



BURNS. 45 

have been so often adopted in print since then, we rather believe 
that good men deal sparingly in hatred, either wise or unwise; 
nay, that a " good " hater is still a desideratum in this world. 
The devil, at least, who passes for the chief and best of that class, 
is said to be nowise an amiable character. 

Of the verses which indignation makes. Burns has also given us 
specimens, and among the best that were ever given. Who will 
forget his " Dweller in yon dungeon dark," i a piece that might 
have been chanted by the Furies of ^schylus?^ The secrets of 
the infernal pit are laid bare, — a boundless, baleful " darkness visi- 
ble," 3 and streaks of hell fire quivering madly in its black, hag- 
gard bosom! 

" Dweller in yon dungeon dark, 

Hangman of creation, mark! 

Who in widow's weeds appears, 

Laden with unhonor'd years. 

Noosing with care a bursting purse, 

Baited with many a deadly curse! " * 

Why should we speak of " Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," ^ 
since all know of it, from the King to the meanest of his subjects? 
This dithyrambic ^ was composed on horseback, in riding in the 

1 See Ode Sacred to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald. 

2 The most powerful of the Greek tragic poets. In one of his tragedies 
he depicts the Furies, or Eumenides, Greek goddesses of vengeance, in their 
pursuit of Orestes for the murder of his mother. 

3 See Milton's description of hell, Paradise Lost, Book I. : 

" Yet from those flames 
No light, but rather darkness visible 
Served only to discover sights of woe." 
* The apparently inadequate occasion of this wrath was the elaborate fu- 
neral pageant of Mrs. Oswald, by which Burns was crowded out of his inn 
and obliged to ride a long distance on a stormy night in 1788. 

5 The first line of the poem Bannockburn : Robert Bruce's Address to his 
Army. " A tradition," writes Burns (September, 1793), " that a certain old 
air was . . . Bruce's march at the battle of Bannockburn ... in my solitary 
wanderings warmed me to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of liberty, . . . 
which I threw into a kind of Scottish ode fitted to the air." 

6 A poem written in a wild, irregular strain. 



46 CARL YLE. 

middle of tempests over the wildest Galloway moor,i in company 
with a Mr. Syme,- who, observing the poet's looks, forbore to 
speak, — judiciously enough, for a man composing " Bruce's Ad- 
dress " might be unsafe to trifle with. Doubtless this stern hymn 
was singing itself, as he formed it, through the soul of Burns ; but 
to the external ear it should be sung with the throat of the whirl- 
wind. So long as there is warm blood in the heart of Scotchman 
or man it will move in fierce thrills under this war ode, the best, 
we believe, that was ever written by any pen. 

Another wild, stormful song, that dwells in our ear and mind 
with a strange tenacity, is " M'Pherson's Farewell." ^ Perhaps 
there is something in the tradition itself that cooperates. For was 
not this grim Celt,* this shaggy northland Cacus,^ that "lived a 
hfe o"f sturt^ and strife, and died by treacherie,"— was not he, too, 
one of the Nimrods'^ and Napoleons of the earth, in the arena of 
his own remote, misty glens, for want of a clearer and wider one? 
Nay, was there not -a touch of grace given him? A fiber of love 
and softness, of poetry itself, must have Hved in his savage heart ; 
for he composed that air the night before his execution. On the 
wings of that poor melody his better soul would soar away above 
oblivion, pain, and all the ignominy and despair which, like an 



1 Galloway, in the southwestern corner of Scotland, contains much barren 
moorland, especially in the north near Ayrshire. 

2 A favorite companion of Burns. 

3 M'Pherson, a Highland freebooter of great strength and some musical 
skill, composed a Farewell while lying under sentence of death, and at the 
gallows' foot played it and then broke his violin over his knee. 

* Until the middle of the last century the wild people of the Highlands 
were exclusively Gaelic, being descended from the aboriginal Celtic Britons. 

5 A half-human monster who, before ^neas's arrival in Italy, inhabited a 
cave on the site of Rome. Having stolen some of the oxen of Alcides (Her- 
cules), he was strangled by the hero after a mighty struggle fsee Virgil's 
^neid, Book VIII. lines 190-270). 

6 Violence. 

■^ Nimrod was the " mighty hunter" said to have founded Babel, or Baby- 
lon, after the deluge (see Gen. x. 8-10). 



BURNS. 47 

avalanche, was hurling him to the abyss. Here, also, as at 
Thebes ^ and in Pelops' ^ line, was material Fate matched against 
man's Free Will, matched in bitterest, though obscure, duel ; and 
the ethereal soul sank not, even in its blindness, without a cry 
which has survived it. But who, except Burns, could have given 
words to such a soul, — words that we never listen to without a 
strange, half -barbarous, half -poetic fellow-feeling? 

' ' Sae 2 rantingly, sae wantonly, 
Sae dauntingly gaed 3 he ; 
He play'd a spring* and danced it round 
Below the gallows tree." 5 

Under a lighter disguise, the same principle of love, which we 
have recognized as the great characteristic of Burns, and of all 
true poets, occasionally manifests itself in the shape of humor. 
Everywhere, indeed, in his sunny moods, a full, buoyant flood of 
mirth rolls through the mind of Burns ; he rises to the high and 
stoops to the low, and is brother and playmate to all Nature. We 
speak not of his bold and often irresistible faculty of caricature, 
for this is drollery rather than humor ; but a much tenderer sport- 
fulness dwells in him, and comes forth here and there in evanes- 
cent and beautiful touches, as in his " Address to the Mouse," or 
the "Farmer's Mare," ** or in his " Elegy on Poor Mailie," '' which 
last may be reckoned his happiest effort of this kind. In these 

1 These were two favorite subjects of Greek tragedy. "Thebes " stood for 
the stories relating to CEdipus, King of Thebes, who blinded himself on dis- 
covering that he had ignorantly killed his father, as had been foretold at his 
birth; " Pelops' line," for those relating to Agamemnon, grandson of Pelops 
(see Milton's II Penseroso, lines 97-99). 

2 So. 3 Went. 4 Tune. 

5 Burns has adapted the refrain of M'Pherson's own song: 

' ' But dantonly and wantonly 
And rantonly I gae ; 
I'll play a tune and dance it roun' 
- Beneath the gallows tree." 

6 The Auld Farmer's New- Year Morning Salutation to his Auld Mare 
Maggie. 7 Mailie was Burns's pet ewe. 



48 CARL YLE. 

pieces there are traits of a humor as fine as that of Sterne/ yet 
altogether different, original, peculiar— the humor of Burns. 

Of the tenderness, the playful pathos, and many other kindred 
qualities of Burns's poetry, much more might be said ; but now, 
with these poor outlines of a sketch, we must prepare to quit this 
part of our subject. To speak of his individual writings adequately 
and with any detail would lead us far beyond our limits. As al- 
ready hinted, we can look on but few of these pieces as, in strict 
critical language, deserving the name of poems ; they are rhymed 
eloquence, rhymed pathos, rhymed sense, yet seldom essentially 
melodious, aerial, poetical. "Tam o' Shanter"^ itself, which en- 
joys so high a favor, does not appear to us at all decisively to 
come under this last category. It is not so much a poem as a 
piece of sparkling rhetoric ; the heart and body of the story still 
Hes hard and dead. He has not gone back, much less carried us 
back, into that dark, earnest, wondering age when the tradition 
was believed and when it took its rise ; he does not attempt by any 
new modeling of his supernatural ware to strike anew that deep, 
mysterious chord of human nature which once responded to such 
things, and which lives in us too, and will forever Hve, though 
silent now, or vibrating with far other notes and to far different 
issues. Our German readers will understand us when we say that 
he is not the Tieck,3 but the Musaus,^ of this tale. Externally it 

1 Laurence Sterne (1713-68), an English clergyman, author of Tristram 
Shandy, and the Sentimental Journey. The latter is called by Carlyle " our 
finest, if not our strongest," specimen of humor. 

2 Called by Burns " my standard performance in the poetical line," and 
certainly the most famous of his long poems. 

3 Ludwig Tieck (1773- 1853), a German romance writer and translator of 
great influence, best known by his Marchen, or Popular Traditionary Tales. 
"These constituted," says Carlyle, "his own peculiar province, to reign in 
which was to penetrate into the inmost shrines of Imagination." 

* Johann K. A. Musaus (1735-87), a German collector of Volksmarchen, 
•which he often used, however, merely as a vehicle for pleasantry of his own. 
Carlyle says, in his German Romance: "The traces of poetry and earnest 
imagination here and there discernible in the original fiction, he treats with 
levity and kind, skeptical derision." 



BURNS. 49 

is all green and living ; yet look closer, it is no firm growth, but 
only ivy on a rock. The piece does not properly cohere ; the 
strange chasm which yawns in our incredulous imaginations be- 
tween the Ayr pubHc house ^ and the gate of Tophet ^ is nowhere 
bridged over ; nay, the idea of such a bridge is laughed at ; and 
thus the tragedy of the adventure becomes a mere drunken 
phantasmagoria, or many-colored spectrum painted on ale vapors, 
and the farce alone has any reality. We do not say that Bums 
should have made much more of this tradition ;3 we rather think 
that, for strictly poetical purposes, not much was to be made of 
it. Neither are we bhnd to the deep, varied, genial power dis- 
played in what he has actually accomplished; but we find far 
more " Shakespearean " qualities, as these of " Tarn o' Shanter " 
have been fondly named, in many of his other pieces ; nay, we 
incline to beheve that this latter might have been written all but 
quite as well by a man who, in place of genius, had only possessed 
talent. 

Perhaps we may venture to say that the most strictly poetical of 
all his " poems " is one which does not appear in Currie's edition, 
but has been often printed before and since under the humble 
title of " The Jolly Beggars." The subject truly is among the 
lowest in nature ; but it only the more shows our poet's gift in 
raising it into the domain of art. To our minds this piece seems 
thoroughly compacted, melted together, refined, and poured forth 
in one flood of true, liquid harmony. It is light, airy, soft of 
movement, yet sharp and precise in its details ; every face is a 
portrait. That "raucle carHn,"* that "wee Apollo," ^ that "son 

1 The cause of " Tarn's " late homeward journey. 

2 Hell ; so called from the Hebrew Tophet, or place of fire, a valley where 
idolatrous rites were practiced. 

3 The tradition that Alloway Kirk, near Ayr, was haunted by witches, 
where a midnight dance was once seen by a belated farmer, who, on his ap- 
plauding, was pursued by the witches to the middle of the river. There, as 
diabolical pursuit can never go beyond the middle of a stream, they were 
checked, with no booty but his horse's tail. 

* Bold old woman. 5 " A pygmy Scraper wi' his fiddle." 

4 



50 CARLYLE. 

of Mars," ^ are Scottish, yet ideal ; the scene is at once a dream 
and the very Ragcastle of " Poosie-Nansie."- Further, it seems 
in a considerable degree complete, a real, self-supporting whole, 
which is the highest merit in a poem. The blanket of the night 
is drawn asunder for a moment ; in full, ruddy, flaming light these 
rough tatterdemalions are seen in their boisterous revel, for the 
strong pulse of life vindicates its right to gladness even here, and 
when the curtain closes we prolong the action without eifort. The 
next day, as the last, our "Caird"3 and our "Ballad Monger"* 
are singing and soldiering; their "brats and callets"^ are hawk- 
ing, begging, cheating; and some other night, in new combina- 
tions, they will wring from Fate another hour of wassail and good 
cheer. Apart from the universal sympathy with man which this 
again bespeaks in Burns, a genuine inspiration and no inconsider- 
able technical talent are manifested here. There is the fidelity, 
humor, warm life, and accurate painting and grouping of some 
Teniers,^ for whom hostlers and carousing peasants are not with- 
out significance. It would be strange, doubtless, to call this the 
best of Burns's writings. We mean to say only that it seems to 
us the most perfect of its kind as a piece of poetical composition, 
strictly so called. In the "Beggars' Opera," '^ in the "Beggars' 
Bush," 8 as other critics have already remarked, there is nothing 
which in real poetic vigor equals this cantata ; nothing, as we think, 
which comes within many degrees of it. 

1 An old soldier reduced to beggary. 

2 The keeper of a tavern in Mauchline, which was a favorite haunt of va- 
grants of all kinds. ^ A Scotch term for a tinker. 

4 A wandering singer. 5 Children and scolding women. 

6 David Teniers, the name borne by two Flemish painters of genre pieces, 
i.e., pictures of fairs, alehouse scenes, etc., of whom the son (1610-85) is the 
more famous. 

'^ The first English comic opera, written by John Gay (1688- 1732), and 
picturing in a realistic, yet entertaining, manner the life of thieves and beg- 
gars. 

8 A melodramatic comedy by John Fletcher (1576- 1625), introducing real 
and pretended vagabonds, and rich in " thieves' gibberish." 



BURNS. 51 

But by far the most finished, complete, and truly inspired pieces 
of Burns are, without dispute, to be found among his " Songs." 
It is here that, although through a small aperture, his light shines 
with least obstruction in its highest beauty, and pure, sunny clear- 
ness. The reason may be that song is a brief, simple species of 
composition, and requires nothing so much for its perfection as 
genuine poetic feeling, genuine music of heart. Yet the song has 
its rules equally with the tragedy,,rules which in most cases are 
poorly fulfilled, in many cases are not so much as felt. We might 
write a long essay on the songs of Burns, which we reckon by far 
the best that Britain has yet produced ; for, indeed, since the era 
of Queen Elizabeth we know not that by any other hand aught 
truly worth attention has been accomplished in this department. 
True, we have songs enough "by persons of quality;" we have 
tawdry, hollow, wine-bred madrigals; many a rhymed speech "in 
the flowing and watery vein of Ossorius, the Portugal bishop," ^ 
rich in sonorous words, and for moral dashed, perhaps, with some 
tint of a sentimental sensuality ; all which many persons cease not 
from endeavoring to sing, though for most part, we fear, the music 
is but from the throat outward, or at best from some region far 
enough short of the soul ; not in which, but in a certain inane 
limbo 2 of the fancy, or even in some vaporous debatable land on 
the outskirts of the nervous system, most of such madrigals and 
rhymed speeches seem to have originated. 

With the songs of Burns we must not name these things. In- 
dependently of the clear, manly, heartfelt sentiment that ever per- 
vades his poetry, his songs are honest in another point of view, — 
in form as well as in spirit. They do not affect to be set to 

1 From Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Book I. Bishop Jeronymo 
Osorio (1506-80), called for his excellent Latin style the " Cicero of Portu- 
gal," wrote an Address to Queen Elizabeth on the True Faith. 

2 Limbo, from Latin limbus{" border "), was, in mediaeval theology, a place 
on the borders of hell for those who, being guiltless, but unbaptized, were 
unfit for either hell or heaven (see Dante's Inferno, Canto IV.). Milton, 
following popular fancy, made it the receptacle of all vain triflers, the " para- 
dise of fools " (see Paradise Lost, Book III. line 496). 



52 CARLYLE. 

music, but they actually and in themselves are music ; they have 
received their life and fashioned themselves together in the 
medium of harmony, as Venus rose from the bosom of the sea.^ 
The story, the feeling, is not detailed, but suggested ; not said, or 
spouted, in rhetorical completeness and coherence, but sung in 
fitful gushes, in glowing hints, in fantastic breaks, in warblings, 
not of the voice only, but of the whole mind. We consider this 
to be the essence of a song, and that no songs since the little 
careless catches and, as it were, drops of song which Shakespeare 
has here and there sprinkled over his plays, fulfill this condition in 
nearly the same degree as most of Burns's do. Such grace and 
truth of external movement, too, presupposes in general a corre- 
sponding force and truth of sentiment and inward meaning. The 
songs of Burns are not more perfect in the former quality than in 
the latter. With what tenderness he sings, yet with what vehe- 
mence and entireness! There is a piercing wail in his sorrow, the 
purest rapture in his joy ; he burns with the sternest ire, or laughs 
with the loudest or slyest mirth ; and yet he is sweet and soft, — 
" sweet as the smile when fond lovers meet, and soft as their part- 
ing tear." If we further take into account the immense variety 
of his subjects, — how, from the loud, flowing revel in "WiUie 
brew'd a peck o' maut," ^ to the still, rapt enthusiasm of sadness 
for " Mary in Heaven ; " 3 from the glad, kind greeting of " Auld 
Lang Syne," or the comic archness of " Duncan Gray," to the 
fire-eyed fury of " Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled," he has found 
a tone and words for every mood of man's heart, — it will seem a 
small praise if we rank him as the first of all our song writers ; 
for we know not where to find one worthy of being second to him. 
It is on his songs, as we believe, that Burns's chief influence as 
an author will ultimately be found to depend ; nor, if our Fletcher's 
aphorism is true, shall we account this a small influence. " Let 

1 Venus, or Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, was said to 
have been born of the sea foam. 

2 Malt (see poem, The Happy Trio). 

3 Written about three years after the death of his Highland Mary. 



BURNS. 53 

me make the songs of a people," said he, " and you shall make 
its laws," 1 Surely if ever any poet might have equaled himself 
with legislators on this ground it was Burns. His songs are already 
part of the mother tongue, not of Scotland only, but of Britain and 
of the millions that in all ends of the earth speak a British lan- 
guage. In hut and hall, as the heart unfolds itself in many- 
colored joy and woe of existence, the name, the voice of that joy 
and that woe is the name and voice which Burns has given them. 
Strictly speaking, perhaps no British man has so deeply affected 
the thoughts and feelings of so many men as this solitary and 
altogether private individual, with means apparently the hum- 
blest. 

In another point of view, moreover, we incline to think that 
Burns's influence may have been considerable. We mean as 
exerted specially on the literature of his country, at least on the 
literature of Scotland. Among the great changes which British, 
particularly Scottish, literature has undergone since that period, 
one of the greatest will be found to consist in its remarkable in- 
crease of nationahty. Even the English writers most popular in 
Biu-ns's time were httle distinguished for their literary patriotism, 
in this its best sense, A certain attenuated cosmopolitanism had 
in good measure taken place of the old insular, home feeling. 
Literature was, as it were, without any local environment, was not 
nourished by the affections which spring from a native soil. Our 
Grays 2 and Glovers ^ seemed to write almost as if in vacuo. ^ 
The thing written bears no mark of place ; it is not written so 

1 Andrew Fletcher (1665- 1716), a prominent orator and member of the 
Scotch Parliament. This often misquoted passage, which occurs in a public 
letter to the Marquis of Montrose, runs thus : " I knew a very wise man that 
believed that if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care 
who should make the laws, of a nation." 

2 Thomas Gray (1716-71), one of the most polished and classical of Eng- 
lish poets, and author of The Bard, The Progress of Poesy, and the Elegy 
Written in a Country Churchyard. 

3 Richard Glover (1712-85), the scholarly poet of Leonidas and The 
Athenaid. * In empty space. 



54 CARLYLE. 

much for Englishmen as for men, or rather, which is the inevi- 
table result of this, for certain generalizations which philosophy 
termed men. Goldsmith ^ is an exception. Not so Johnson ; the 
scene of his " Rambler " - is little more English than that of his 
" Rasselas." ^ 

But if such was in some degree the case with England, it was 
in the highest degree the case with Scotland. In fact, our Scot- 
tish literature had at that period a very singular aspect, unex- 
ampled, so far as we know, except perhaps at Geneva, where the 
same state of matters appears still to continue. For a long period 
after Scotland became British we had no literature. At the date 
when Addison and Steele were writing their "Spectators,"* our 
good John Boston ^ was writing, with the noblest intent, but alike 
in defiance of grammar and philosophy, his " Fourfold State of 
Man." Then came the schisms in our national church ^ and the 
fiercer schisms in our body politic ; theologic ink and Jacobite '^ 
blood, with gall enough in both cases, seemed to have blotted 
out the intellect of the country ; however, it was only obscured, 
not obliterated. Lord Karnes ^ made nearly the first attempt at 

1 Oliver Goldsmith (1728-74). His prose romance, The Vicar of Wake- 
field, and his poem, The Deserted Village, are remarkable, as products of 
that classical age, for their genuine human feeling and local color. 

2 A periodical like the Spectator, professing to deal with contemporary 
English society. 

3 Johnson's one prose tale, the scene of which is laid in Abyssinia and 
Egypt, but whose tone of thought is by no means oriental. 

* Joseph Addison (1672- 1719) and Sir Richard Steele (1675-1729) pro- 
duced in partnership the periodical papers called the Tatler and the Spec- 
tator, gently satirizing English society. 

5 Thomas (not John) Boston (1676- 1732), a Calvinistic divine, whose 
Human Nature in its Fourfold State was published in 1720. 

6 Between 1733 and 1761 several secessions from the Scottish established 
church took place. 

7 The adherents of the deposed James II. (Latin Jacohis) and his son, re- 
volted in Scotland in 1715, and again in 1745. 

8 Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696- 1782), a Scottish judge, whose best 
work. The Elements of Criticism, is the first attempt at scientific study of the 
metaphysical principles of the fine arts. 



BUHNS. 55 

writing English ; and ere long Hume,^ Robertson,- Smith,^ and a 
whole host of followers, attracted hither the eyes of all Europe. 
And yet in this brilliant resuscitation of our " fervid genius " there 
was nothing truly Scottish, nothing indigenous ; except, perhaps, 
the natural impetuosity of intellect which we sometimes claim, and 
are sometimes upbraided with, as a characteristic of our nation. It 
is curious to remark that Scotland, so full of writers, had no Scot- 
tish culture, nor, indeed, any English; our culture was almost 
exclusively French. It was by studying Racine * and Voltaire,^ 
Batteux ^ and Boileau,'^ that Kames had trained himself to be a 
critic and philosopher; it was the light of Montesquieu ^ and 
Mably 9 that guided Robertson in his political speculations ; 
Quesnay's ^*^ lamp that kindled the lamp of Adam Smith. Hume 
was too rich a man to borrow, and perhaps he reacted on the 
French more than he was acted on by them ; but neither had he 

1 David Hume (1711-76), a philosopher, and author of various Essays, a 
History of England, and The Natural History of Religion. 

2 Dr. William Robertson (1721-93), a minister, and author of famous 
histories of Scotland, the Emperor Charles V., and America. 

3 Dr. Adam Smith (1723-90), a philosopher, on whose Inquiry into the 
Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is based the science of political 
economy. 

* Jean Racine (1628-99), the most polished of the French classical drama- 
tists. 

5 Fran9ois Arouet de Voltaire (1694-1778), the first French critic, phi- 
losopher, historian, and poet of his age, whose brilliant satire, though not 
atheistical, was highly skeptical and very destructive to current beliefs. 

6 Charles Batteux (1713-80), author of a Treatise on the Fine Arts. 

"^ Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux (1636- 171 1), a French poet, the chief critic 
of his time, and author of Satires, the Lutrin, and the famous Art Poetique. 

8 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689- 1755), a French 
philosophical writer, whose Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of Laws) became the 
basis of modern political science. 

9 Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-85), a somewhat superficial French 
enthusiast for the republican systems of the ancients, of so great reputation 
in his own time that the American Congress invited him to write his Obser- 
vations on the Government and Laws of the United States (1784). 

10 Fran9ois Quesnay (1694- 1774), a French physician, inventor of the term 
" political economy " and of the doctrine that natural laws may be safely 



56 CARLYLE. 

aught to do with Scotland. Edinburgh, equally with La Fleche,i 
was but the lodging and laboratory in which he not so much 
morally lived as metaphysically investigated. Never, perhaps, 
was there a class of writers so clear and well ordered, yet so 
totally destitute, to all appearance, of any patriotic affection, nay, 
of any human affection whatever. The French wits of the period 
were as unpatriotic ; but their general deficiency in moral principle, 
not to say their avowed sensuality and unbelief in all virtue, strictly 
so called, render this accountable enough. We hope there is a 
patriotism founded on something better than prejudice ; that our 
country may be dear to us without injury to our philosophy ; that 
in loving and justly prizing all other lands we may prize justly, 
and yet love before all others, our own stern motherland, and the 
venerable structure of social and moral Hfe which mind has 
through long ages been building up for us there. Surely there is 
nourishment for the better part of man's heart in all this ; surely 
the roots that have fixed themselves in the very core of man's being 
may be so cultivated as to grow up, not into briers, but into roses, 
in the field of his life. Our Scottish sages have no such propensi- 
ties ; the field of Iheir hfe shows neither briers nor roses, but only 
a flat, continuous thrashing floor for logic, whereon all questions, 
from the " Doctrine of Rent " 2 to the " Natural History of Reli- 
gion," are thrashed and sifted with the same mechanical impartiality. 
With Sir Walter Scott ^ at the head of our literature, it cannot 

trusted to regulate the material affairs of nations. This is sometimes called 
the doctrine of " laissez faire " (" let things go as they will "). 

1 A French town to which Hume retired to live cheaply while writing his 
Treatise on Human Nature. 

2 The principle that the pressure of population on the means of subsist- 
ence creates rent, or an increase of value, on those lands where the means of 
subsistence may most easily be produced. This principle is developed into 
various theories. 

3 Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), author of several poetical romances and 
the Waverley Novels, devoted a large proportion of his works to the contem- 
porary life of his native Scotland. His popularity during the last twenty 
years of his life was great. 



BURNS. 57 

be denied that much of this evil is past, or rapidly passing away. 
Our chief literary men, whatever other faults they may have, no 
longer live among us like a French colony, or some knot of Prop- 
aganda 1 missionaries, but like natural-born subjects of the soil, 
partaking and sympathizing in all otu attachments, humors, and 
habits. Our literature no longer grows in water, but in mold, and 
with the true, racy virtues of the soil and climate. How much of 
this change may be due to Burns, or to any other individual, it 
might be difficult to estimate. Direct literary imitation of Burns 
was not to be looked for ; but his example in the fearless adop- 
tion of domestic subjects could not but operate from afar ; and 
certainly in no heart did the love of country ever burn with a 
warmer glow than in that of Bums. " A tide of Scottish preju- 
dice," as he modestly calls this deep and generous feeling, had 
been poured along his veins, and he felt that it would boil there 
till the flood gates shut in eternal rest. It seemed to him as if he 
could do so little for his country, and yet would so gladly have 
done all. One small province stood open for him, that of Scot- 
tish song ; and how eagerly he entered on it, how devotedly he 
labored there! In his toilsome journeyings this object never 
quits him ; it is the little Happy Valley ^ of his careworn heart. In 
the gloom of his own affliction he eagerly searches after some 
lonely brother of the muse, and rejoices to snatch one other name 
from the oblivion that was covering it.^ These were early feel- 
ings and they abode with him to the end : 

1 Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, or Society for Propagating the Faith, 
a Roman Catholic association having charge of missions. 

2 " Happy Valley," i.e., a retreat like the Happy Valley in which Rasselas, 
Prince of Abyssinia, was said to have been reared, and from which all troubles 
were excluded (see Johnson's Rasselas). 

3 In 1 787 Burns erected at his own expense a stone over the grave of the 
poet Fergusson, in Edinburgh, with the verse : 

" No sculptur'd marble here, nor pompous lay. 
No ' storied urn, ' nor ' animated bust ; ' 
This simple stone directs pale Scotia's way 
To pour her sorrows o'er her poet's dust." 



58 CARLYLE. 

" A wish (I mind its power), 
A wish that to my latest hour 
Will strongly heave my breast : 
That I, for poor auld Scotland's sake, 
Some useful plan or book could make, 
Or sing a sang at least. 

" The rough bur Thistle spreading wide 
Amang l the bearded bear,2 
I turn'd my weeding clips 3 aside. 
And spared the symbol dear." * 

But, to leave the mere literary character of Burns, which has 
already detained us too long, far more interesting than any of his 
written works, as it appears to us, are his acted ones, — the life he 
willed and was fated to lead among his fellow-men. These poems 
are but like little rhymed fragments scattered here and there in 
the grand unrhymed romance of his earthly existence ; and it is 
only when intercalated ^ in this at their proper places that they at- 
tain their full measure of significance. And this too, alas, was 
but a fragment ! The plan of a mighty edifice had been sketched ; 
some columns, porticoes, firm masses of building, stand com- 
pleted ; the rest more or less clearly indicated, with many a far- 
stretching tendency, which only studious and friendly eyes can 
now trace, toward the purposed termination. For the work is 
broken off in the middle, almost in the beginning, and rises among 
us, beautiful and sad, at once unfinished and a ruin ! If chari- 
table judgment was necessary in estimating his poems, and justice 
required that the aim and the manifest power to fulfill it must 
often be accepted for the fulfillment, much more is this the case 
in regard to his Hfe, the sum and result of all his endeavors, where 
his difficulties came upon him, not in detail only, but in mass ; and 
so much has been left unaccomplished,— nay, was mistaken and 
altogether marred! 

Properly speaking, there is but one era in the life of Bums, and 

1 Among. 2 Barley. 3 Shears. 

i The thistle is the Scottish national emblem. 5 Inserted. 



BURNS. 59 

that the earliest. We have not youth and manhood, but only 
youth ; for to the end we discern no decisive change in the com- 
plexion of his character ; in his thirty-seventh year he is still, as 
it were, in youth. With all that resoluteness of judgment, that 
penetrating insight, and singular maturity of intellectual power ex- 
hibited in his writings, he never attains to any clearness regarding 
himself ; to the last he never ascertains his peculiar aim, even with 
such distinctness as is common among ordinary men, and there- 
fore never can pursue it with that singleness of will which insures 
success and some contentment to such men. To the last he wavers 
between two purposes. Glorying in his talent like a true poet, he 
yet cannot consent to make this his chief and sole glory, and to 
follow it as the one thing needful through poverty or riches, through 
good or evil report. Another far meaner ambition still cleaves to 
him: he must dream and struggle about a certain "rock of in- 
dependence "^ which, natural and even admirable as it might be, 
was still but a warring with the world on the comparatively insig- 
nificant ground of his being more completely or less completely 
supplied with money than others ; of his standing at a higher or at 
a lower altitude in general estimation than others. For the world 
still appears to him, as to the young, in borrowed colors. He ex- 
pects from it what it cannot give to any man ; seeks for content- 
ment not within himself, in action and wise effort, but from without, 
in the kindness of circumstances, in love, friendship, honor, pecun- 
iary ease. He would be happy not actively and in himself, but 
passively and from some ideal cornucopia of enjoyments, not 
earned by his own labor, but showered on him by the beneiicence 
of Destiny. Thus, like a young man, he cannot gird himself up 
for any worthy, well-calculated goal, but swerves to and fro be- 
tween passionate hope and remorseful disappointment. Rushing 
onward with a deep, tempestuous force, he surmounts or breaks 
asunder many a barrier ; travels, nay, advances far, but, advancing 
only under uncertain guidance, is ever and anon tiorned from his 
path, and to the last cannot reach the only true happiness of a 
1 See The Letters of Burns, Nos. XCV. and CXXI, 



6o CARLYLE. 

man,— that of clear, decided activity in the sphere for which by 
nature and circumstances he has been fitted and appointed. 

We do not say these things in dispraise of Burns ; nay, perhaps 
they but interest us the more in his favor. This blessing is not 
given soonest to the best, but rather it is often the greatest minds 
that are latest in obtaining it ; for where most is to be developed 
most time may be required to develop it. A complex condition 
had been assigned him from without, as complex a condition from 
within. No " preestabUshed harmony"! existed between the clay 
soil of Mossgiel and the empyrean soul of Robert Burns ; it was 
not wonderful that the adjustment between them should have 
been long postponed, and his arm long cumbered, and his sight 
confused in so vast and discordant an economy as he had been 
appointed steward over. Byron was at his death but a year 
younger than Burns, and through life, as it might have appeared, 
far more simply situated ; yet in him too we can trace no such 
adjustment, no such moral manhood, but at best, and only a little 
before his end, the beginning of what seemed such. 

By much the most striking incident in Burns's life is his joiu"- 
ney to Edinburgh ; but perhaps a still more important one is his 
residence at Irvine, so early as in his twenty-third year. Hither- 
to his life had been poor and toilwom, but otherwise not ungen- 
ial, and, with all its distresses, by no means unhappy. In his 
parentage, deducting outward circumstances, he had every rea- 
son to reckon himself fortunate. His father was a man of 
thoughtful, intense, earnest character, as the best of oiu: peasants 
are ; valuing knowledge, possessing some, and, what is far better 
and rarer, open-minded for more ; a man with a keen insight and 
devout heart ; reverent toward God, friendly, therefore, at once, 

1 By a theory propounded by the German philosopher Leibnitz (1646- 
17 16), perceptions are not the effect of the action of the outside world upon 
the soul, but arise spontaneously in the soul itself, yet in perfect conformity 
with the actions of the outside world. The soul and the world resemble two 
clocks keeping time exactly together, yet not acting one upon another. This 
theory is the so-called doctrine of a " preestablished harmony." 



BURNS. 6 1 

and fearless toward all that God has made ; in one word, though 
but a hard-handed peasant, a complete and fully unfolded man. 
Such a father is seldom found in any rank in society, and was 
worth descending far in society to seek. Unfortunately, he was 
very poor. Had he been even a little richer, almost never so 
little, the whole might have issued far otherwise. Mighty events 
turn on a straw ; the crossing of a brook decides the conquest of 
the world. 1 Had this William Burnes's small seven acres of nur- 
sery ground anywise prospered, the boy Robert had been sent to 
school; had struggled forward, as so many weaker men do, to 
some university; come forth not as a rustic wonder, but as 
a regular, well-trained, intellectual workman, and changed the 
whole course of British literature, — for it lay in him to have done 
this. But the niursery did not prosper ; poverty sank his whole 
family below the help of even our cheap school system ; Burns 
remained a hard-worked plowboy, and British literature took its 
own course. Nevertheless, even in this rugged scene there is 
much to nourish him. If he drudges it is with his brother and 
for his father and mother, whom he loves and would fain shield 
from want. Wisdom is not banished from their poor hearth, 
nor the balm of natural feeling ; the solemn words, " Let us wor- 
ship God," are heard there from a " priestlike father ;" ^ if threat- 
enings of unjust men throw mother and children into tears,^ these 
are tears not of grief only, but of holiest affection ; every heart 
in that humble group feels itself the closer knit to every other; 
in their hard warfare they are there together, a "little band of 
brethren." Neither are such tears, and the deep beauty that 
dwells in them, their only portion. Light visits the hearts, as it 

1 The allusion is to Caesar's casting the die for the revolution which made 
him master of Italy, by crossing the Rubicon, the stream which divided his 
province of Gaul from Italy, and which the law forbade the proconsul of Gaul 
to pass. 

2 See The Cotter's Saturday Night, stanzas i2-l6. 

3 In 1775 Burns's father, his farm proving a bad bargain, fell into the 
hands of the factor described in The Twa Dogs. " The scoundrel factor's 
insolent, threatening letters," says Burns, " used to set us all in tears." 



62 CARLYLE. 

does the eyes, of all living. There is a force, too, in this youth 
that enables him to trample on misfortune ; nay, to bind it under 
his feet to make him sport. For a bold, warm, buoyant humor 
of character has been given him ; and so the thick-coming shapes 
of evil are welcomed with a gay, friendly irony, and in their 
closest pressure he bates no jot of heart or hope. Vague yearn- 
ings of ambition fail not as he grows up ; dreamy fancies hang 
like cloud cities around him ; the curtain of existence is slowly 
rising in many-colored splendor and gloom, and the auroral Hght 
of first love is gilding his horizon, and the music of song is on 
his path. And so he walks 

" In glory and in joy 
Behind his plow, upon the mountain side." l 

We ourselves know from the best evidence that up to this date 
Burns was happy; nay, that he was the gayest, brightest, most 
fantastic, fascinating being to be found in the world ; more soj 
even, than he ever afterwards appeared. But now at this early 
age he quits the paternal roof; goes forth into looser, louder, 
more exciting society; and becomes initiated in those dissipa- 
tions, those vices, which a certain class of philosophers have 
asserted to be a natm^al preparative for entering on active life,— 
a kind of mud bath in which the youth is, as it were, necessitated 
to steep and, we suppose, cleanse himself before the real toga of 
manhood ^ can be laid on him. We shall not dispute much with 
this class of philosophers ; we hope they are mistaken ; for sin 
and remorse so easily beset us at all stages of life, and are always 
such indifferent company, that it seems hard we should at any 
stage be forced and fated not only to meet but to yield to them, 
and even serve for a term in their leprous armada.^ We hope it 

1 An allusion to Burns in Wordsworth's poem of Resolution and Inde- 
pendence. 

2 The toga, the distinctive garment of the Roman citizen, could not be 
assumed by a youth until he had come of age. 

3 The Spanish term for an armed fleet such as that sent against England 
in ie;88. 



BURNS. 63 

is not so. Clear we are, at all events, it cannot be the training 
one receives in this devil's service, but only our determining to 
desert from it, that fits us for true, manly action. We become 
men not after we have been dissipated and disappointed in the 
chase of false pleasure, but after we have ascertained in any way 
what impassable barriers hem us in through this hfe, how mad it 
is to hope for contentment to our infinite soul from the gifts of 
this extremely finite world, that a man must be sufficient for him- 
self, and that for suffering and enduring there is no remedy but 
striving and doing. Manhood begins when we have in any way 
made truce with necessity ; begins even when we have sur- 
rendered to necessity, as the most part only do ; but begins 
joyfully and hopefully only when we have reconciled ourselves 
to necessity, and thus in reahty triumphed over it, and felt that 
in necessity we are free. Surely such lessons as this last, which 
jn one shape or other is the grand lesson for every mortal man, 
are better learned from the lips of a devout mother, in the looks 
and actipns of a devout father, while the heart is yet soft and 
pliant, than in collision with the sharp adamant of fate, attract- 
ing us to shipwreck us,i when the heart is grown hard, and may 
be broken before it will become contrite. Had Burns continued 
to learn this as he was already learning it, in his father's cottage, 
he would have learned it fully,— which he never did,— and been 
saved many a lasting aberration, many a bitter hour and year of 
remorseful sorrow. 

It seems to us another circumstance of fatal import in Burns's 
history that at this time, too, he became involved in the religious 
quarrels of his district ; that he was enlisted and feasted as the 
fighting man of the New Light priesthood in their highly un- 
profitable warfare. At the tables of these free-minded clergy he 
learned much more than was needful for him. Such liberal ridi- 
cule of fanaticism awakened in his mind scruples about religion 

1 See the story of the Third Calendar in the Arabian Nights, where a 
mountain of adamant, attracting a ship because of her iron nails, finally draws 
out the nails, so that the ship sinks at the mountain's foot. 



64 CARLYLE. 

itself, and a whole world of doubts, which it required quite an- 
other set of conjurers than these men to exorcise. We do not 
say that such an intellect as his could have escaped similar 
doubts at some period of his history, or even that he could at a 
later period have come through them altogether victorious and 
unharmed ; but it seems peculiarly unfortunate that this time, 
above all others, should have been fixed for the encounter. For 
now, with principles assailed by evil example from without, by 
" passions raging like demons " from within, he had little need 
of skeptical misgivings to whisper treason in the heat of the bat- 
tle, or to cut off his retreat if he were already defeated. He 
loses his feehng of innocence ; his mind is at variance with itself ; 
the old divinity no longer presides there, but wild desires and 
wild repentance alternately oppress him. Ere long, too, he has 
committed himself before the world; his character for sobriety, 
dear to a Scottish peasant as few corrupted worldlings can even 
conceive, is destroyed in the eyes of men; and his only refuge 
consists in trying to disbelieve his guiltiness, and is but a refuge 
of lies. The blackest desperation now gathers over him, broken 
only by red lightnings of remorse. The whole fabric of his life 
is blasted asunder ; for now not only his character, but his per- 
sonal Hberty, is to be lost; men and fortune are leagued for his 
hurt; "hungry Ruin has him in the wind." He sees no escape 
but the saddest of all, — exile from his loved country to a country 
in every sense inhospitable and abhorrent to him. While the 
" gloomy night is gathering fast " i in mental storm and solitude, 
as well as in physical, he sings his wild farewell to Scotland : 

" Farewell, my friends; farewell, my foes! 
My peace with these, my love with those. 
The bursting tears my heart declare ; 
Adieu, my native banks of Ayr!" 2 

Light breaks suddenly in on him in floods, but still a false, 
transitory light, and no real sunshine. He is invited to Edin- 

1 The first line of The Author's Farewell to his Native Country. 

2 The last lines of the same poem. 



BURNS. 65 

burgh ; hastens thither with anticipating heart ; is welcomed as in 
a triumph and with universal blandishment and acclamation; 
whatever is wisest, whatever is greatest or loveliest there, gathers 
round him to gaze on his face, to show him honor, sympathy, 
affection. Burns's appearance among the sages and nobles of 
Edinburgh must be regarded as one of the most singular phenom- 
ena in modern literature ; almost like the appearance of some 
Napoleon among the crowned sovereigns of modem politics. 
For it is nowise as "' a mockery king," 1 set there by favor, tran- 
siently and for a purpose, that he will let himself be treated ; still 
less is he a mad Rienzi,2 whose sudden elevation turns his too 
weak head ; but he stands there on his own basis, cool, unaston- 
ished, holding his equal rank from Nature herself, putting forth 
no claim which there is not strength in him, as well as about him, 
to vindicate. Mr. Lockhart has some forcible observations on 
this point: 

" It needs no effort of imagination," says he, " to conceive 
what the sensations of an isolated set of scholars (almost all 
either clergymen or professors) must have been in the presence 
of this big-boned, black-browed, brawny stranger, with his great, 
flashing eyes, who, having forced his way among them from the 
plowtail at a single stride, manifested in the whole strain of his 
bearing and conversation a most thorough conviction that in the 
society of the most eminent men of his nation he was exactly 
where he was entitled to be ; hardly deigned to flatter them by 
exhibiting even an occasional symptom of being flattered by their 
notice ; by turns calmly measured himself against the most culti- 
vated understandings of his time in discussion ; overpowered the 
bonmots ^ of the most celebrated convivialists by broad floods of 

1 Cf. "Oh that I were a mockery king of snow!" — Shakespeare's 
Richard II., act iv. sc. i. 

2 Cola di Rienzi (1312-54), a Roman peasant scholar who, to reform the 
abuses growing out of the absence of the Pope at Avignon, made himself dic- 
tator under the title of "Tribune;" but, becoming arrogant and capricious, he 
soon provoked the people to rebel, and they finally killed him. 

3 Witty sayings. 

5 



66 CARLYLE. 

merriment, impregnated with all the burning life of genius; as- 
tounded bosoms habitually enveloped in the thrice-piled^ folds 
of social reserve, by compelling them to tremble — nay, to tremble 
visibly — beneath the fearless touch of natural pathos; and all 
this without indicating the smallest willingness to be ranked 
among those professional ministers of excitement who are con- 
tent to be paid in money and smiles for doing what the spectators 
and auditors would be ashamed of doing in their own persons, 
even if they had the power of doing it ; and last, and probably 
worst of all, who was known to be in the habit of enlivening so- 
cieties which they would have scorned to approach still more 
frequently than their own, with eloquence no less magnificent, 
with wit in all likelihood still more daring, — often enough, — as 
the superiors whom he fronted without alarm might have guessed 
from the beginning, and had ere long no occasion to guess, — with 
wit pointed at themselves." 

The farther we remove from this scene, the more singular will 
it seem to us ; details of the exterior aspect of it are already full 
of interest. Most readers recollect Mr. Walker's personal inter- 
views with Burns as among the best passages of his " Narrative." 
A time will come when this reminiscence of Sir Walter Scott's, 
slight though it is, will also be precious : 

" As for Burns," writes Sir Walter,^ " I may truly say, ' Virgil- 
ium vidi tantum.'^ I was a lad of fifteen in 1786-87, when 
he came first to Edinburgh, but had sense and feeling enough to 
be much interested in his poetry, and would have given the world 
to know him ; but I had very little acquaintance with any liter- 
ary people, and still less with the gentry of the west country, the 
two sets that he most frequented. Mr. Thomas Grierson was at 
that time a clerk of my father's. He knew Burns, and promised 

1 The richness of velvets was formerly determined by the nap or pile, 
so that " thrice -piled " indicates a superior quality. 

2 In a letter to Lockhart, afterwards included in the latter's Life of Scott, 
chap. V. 

'^ " Virgil I merely saw " (quoted from the Tristia of the Latin poet Ovid). 



BUJiNS. 67 

to ask him to his lodgings to dinner, but had no opportunity to 
keep his word ; otherwise I might have seen more of this distin- 
guished man. As it was, I saw him one day at the late vener- 
able Professor Ferguson's,^ where there were several gentlemen 
of Hterary reputation, among whom I remember the celebrated 
Mr. Dugald Stewart.^ Of course we youngsters sat silent, looked, 
and listened. The only thing I remember which was remark- 
able in Burns's manner was the effect produced upon him by a 
print of Bunbury's,^ representing a soldier lying dead on the 
snow, his dog sitting in misery on one side, on the other his 
widow with a child in her arms. These lines were written be- 
neath : 

" ' Cold on Canadian 4 hills, or Minden's 5 plain, 

Perhaps that mother wept her soldier slain ; 

Bent o'er her babe, her eye dissolved in dew, 

The big drops mingling with the milk he drew 

Gave the sad presage of his future years. 

The child of misery baptized in tears.' 

" Burns seemed much affected by the print, or rather by the 
ideas which it suggested to his mind. He actually shed tears. 
He asked whose the lines were ; and it chanced that nobody but 
myself remembered that they occur in a half-forgotten poem of 
Langhorne's,6 called by the unpromising title of ' The Justice of 
Peace.' I whispered my information to a friend present ; he 
mentioned it to Burns, who rewarded me with a look and a word 

1 Adam Ferguson (1724- 1816), Scotch minister and philosopher, 

2 See Note 2, p. 40. 

3 An English amateur artist and caricaturist ( 1750- 181 1). 

* During the Seven Years' War, hostilities between the French and the 
English were carried into their American colonies, resulting, in 1760, in the 
cession of Canada to the English. 

5 A town on the Weser in Prussia, where, during the Seven Years' War, 
the English and Prussians defeated the French in 1759. 

^ Dr. John Langhorne (1735-79), poet, and translator of Plutarch's Lives. 
His poems are deservedly forgotten, with the exception of this Appeal to 
Country Justices, in which rural English life is painted with accuracy and 
pathos. 



68 CARLYLE. 

which, though of mere civiHty, I then received, and still recollect, 
with very great pleasure. 

" His person was strong and robust ; his manners rustic, not 
clownish, a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity, which re- 
ceived part of its effect, perhaps, from one's knowledge of his 
extraordinary talents. His features are represented in Mr. Na- 
smyth's picture,^ but to me it conveys the idea that they are dimin- 
ished, as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more 
massive than it looks in any of the portraits. I should have taken 
the poet, had I not known what he was, for a very sagacious 
country farmer of the old Scotch school ; i.e., none of your mod- 
ern agriculturalists who keep laborers for their drudgery, but the 
douce giideman 2 who held his own plow. There was a strong ex- 
pression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye 
alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. 
It was large and of a dark cast, which glowed (I say literally 
glowed) when he spoke with feeling or interest. I never saw such 
another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most dis- 
tinguished men of my time. His conversation expressed perfect 
self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the 
men who were the most learned of their time and country he ex- 
pressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intru- 
sive forwardness ; and when he differed in opinion he did not 
hesitate to expi^ess it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty. 
I do not remember any part of his conversation distinctly enough 
to be quoted ; nor did I ever see him again, except in the street, 
where he did not recognize me, as I could not expect he should. 
He was much caressed in Edinburgh, but (considering what lit- 
erary emoluments have been since his day^) the efforts made for 
his rehef were extremely trifling. 

1 Alexander Nasmyth (1758- 1840), a Scotch landscape painter of no great 
merit, who drew, in 1787, the only authentic portrait of Burns for the volume 
of his poems. 

'^ Sober goodman, or husband. 

3 Scott himself had just sold Woodstock for over eight thousand pounds. 



BURNS. 69 

" I remember, on this occasion I mention, I thought Bnrns's 
acquaintance with EngHsh poetry was rather hmited; and also 
that, having twenty times the abihties of Allan Ramsay and of 
Fergusson, he talked of them with too much humility as his 
models. There was doubtless national predilection in his estimate. 

" This is all I can tell you about Burns. I have only to add 
that his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a 
farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird. I do not speak 
in 7nalam partem ^ when I say I never saw a man in company 
with his superiors in station or information more perfectly free 
from either the reality or the affectation of embarrassment. I 
was told, but did not observe it, that his address to females was 
extremely deferential, and always with a tiun either to the pa- 
thetic or humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. I 
have heard the late Duchess of Gordon 2 remark this. I do not 
know anything I can add to these recollections of forty years 
since." 

^2, The conduct of Burns under this dazzling blaze of favor, the 
calm, unaffected, manly manner in which he not only bore it, but 
estimated its value, has justly been regarded as the best proof that 
could be given of his real vigor and integrity of mind. A little 
natural vanity, some touches of hypocritical modesty, some glim- 
merings of affectation, at least some fear of being thought affected, 
we could have pardoned in almost any man ; but no such indica- 
tion is to be traced here. In his unexampled situation the young 
peasant is not a moment perplexed ; so many strange hghts do not 
confuse him, do not lead him astray. Nevertheless we cannot 
but perceive that this winter did him great and lasting injury. A 
somewhat clearer knowledge of men's affairs — scarcely of their 
characters — it did afford him ; but a sharper feeling of Fortune's 
unequal arrangements in their social destiny it also left with him. 

1- With a bad grace. 

2 Jane, wife of the fourth Duke of Gordon (1749- 1812), famous for her 
beauty and wit, and arbitress of Edinburgh fashion at this time. She remarked 
that Burns was the only man who had ever carried her off her feet. 



7° CARLYLE. 

He had seen the gay and gorgeous arena in which the powerful 
are born to play their parts, nay, had himself stood in the midst 
of it ; and he felt more bitterly than ever that here he was but a 
looker-on and had no part or lot in that splendid game. From 
this time a jealous, indignant fear of social degradation takes pos- 
session of him, and perverts, so far as aught could pervert, his 
private contentment and his feehngs toward his richer fellows. 
It was clear to Burns that he had talent enough to make a for- 
tune, or a hundred fortunes, could he but have rightly willed this ; 
it was clear also that he willed something far different and there- 
fore could not make one. Unhappy it was that he had not 
power to choose the one and reject the other, but must halt for- 
ever between two opinions, two objects, making hampered ad- 
vancement toward either. But so is it with many men : we " long 
for the merchandise, yet would fain keep the price ; " and so stand 
chaffering with Fate in vexatious altercation till the night come 
and our fair is over! 

The Edinburgh learned of that period were in general more 
noted for clearness of head than for warmth of heart. With the 
exception of the good old Blacklock,i whose help was too in- 
effectual, scarcely one among them seems to have looked at Burns 
with any true sympathy, or, indeed, much otherwise than as a 
highly curious thing. By the great, also, he is treated in the cus- 
tomary fashion, entertained at their tables, and dismissed. Cer- 
tain modica 2 of pudding and praise are, from time to time, gladly 
exchanged for the fascination of his presence, which exchange 
once effected, the bargain is finished and each party goes his sev- 
eral way. At the end of this strange season Burns gloomily sums 
up his gains and losses and meditates on the chaotic future. In 
money he is somewhat richer ; in fame and the show of happiness 

1 Dr. Thomas Blacklock (1721-91), a blind Scotch poet, whose verse, 
chiefly descriptive, shows a remarkable familiarity with visible nature, but has 
little originality. It was a letter from Blacklock that took Burns to Edinburgh 
instead of to Jamaica. 

2 Plural of the Latin modiciun (" a morsel "i- 



BURNS. IT- 

infinitely richer ; but in the substance of it as poor as ever,— nay, 
poorer ; for his heart is now maddened still more with the fever 
of worldly ambition, and through long years the disease will rack 
him with unprofitable sufferings, and weaken his strength for all 
true and noble aims. 

What Burns was next to do or to avoid, how a man so circum- 
stanced was now to guide himself toward his true advantage, 
might at this point of time have been a question for the wisest. 
It was a question, too, which, apparently, he was left altogether 
to answer for himself ; of his learned or rich patrons it had not 
struck any individual to turn a thought on this so trivial matter. 
Without claiming for Burns the praise of perfect sagacity, we 
must say that his excise and farm scheme does not seem to us a 
very unreasonable one ; that we should be at a loss even now to 
suggest one decidedly better. Certain of his admirers have felt 
scandahzed at his ever resolving to gauge, and would have had 
him lie at the pool till the spirit of patronage stirred the waters, 
that so, with one friendly plunge, all his sorrows might be healed.^ 
Unwise counselors! They know not the manner of this spirit, 
and how, in the lap of most golden dreams, a man might have 
happiness, were it not that in the interim he must die of hunger! 
It reflects credit on the manliness and sound sense of Burns that 
he felt so early on what ground he was standing, and preferred 
self-help on the humblest scale to dependence and inaction, 
though with hope of far more splendid possibilities. But even 
these possibilities were not rejected in his scheme ; he might ex- 
pect, if it chanced that he had any friend, to rise in no long period 
into something even like opulence and leisure ; while, again, if it 
chanced that he had no friend, he could still live in security ; and 
for the rest, he " did not intend to borrow honor from any pro- 
fession." We reckon that his plan was honest and well calculated ; 
all turned on the execution of it. Doubtless it failed ; yet not, 
we believe, from any vice inherent in itself. Nay, after all, it was 
no failure of external means, but of internal, that overtook Burns. 
1 See John v. 2-9. 



72 CARLYLE. 

His was no bankruptcy of the purse, but of the soul ; to his last 
day he owed no man anything. 

Meanwhile he begins well with two good and wise actions. 
His donation to his mother, munificent from a man whose income 
had lately been seven pounds a year, was worthy of him, and not 
more than worthy. Generous also, and worthy of him, was the 
treatment of the woman whose Hfe's welfare now depended on 
his pleasure. A friendly observer might have hoped serene days 
for him ; his mind is on the true road to peace with itself ; what 
clearness he still wants will be given as he proceeds, for the best 
teacher of duties that still lie dim to us is the practice of those we 
see and have at hand. Had the " patrons of genius," who could 
give him nothing, but taken nothing from him, — at least, nothing 
more! — the wounds of his heart would have healed, vulgar am- 
bition would have died away. Toil and Frugality would have been 
welcome, since Virtue dwelt with them ; and Poetry would have 
shone through them as of old ; and in her clear, ethereal light, 
which was his own by birthright, he might have looked down on 
his earthly destiny and all its obstructions, not with patience only, 
but with love. 

But the patrons of genius would not have it so. Picturesque 
tourists, all manner of fashionable danglers after literature, and, 
far worse, all manner of convivial Maecenases ^ hovered round him 
in his retreat, and his good as well as his weak quahties secured 
them influence over him. He was flattered by their notice, and 
his warm, social nature made it impossible for him to shake them 
off and hold on his way apart from them. These men, as we be- 
lieve, were proximately the means of his ruin. Not that they 
meant him any ill ; they only meant themselves a little good ; if 
he suffered harm let him look to it ! But they wasted his precious 
time and his precious talent ; they disturbed his composure, broke 
down his returning habits of temperance and assiduous, contented 
exertion. Their pampering was baneful to him; their cruelty, 

1 Maecenas, who lived in the Augustan Age of Rome, was a somewhat 
epicurean patron of literature and art ; hence, any patronizer of poets or artists. 



BURNS. 73 

which soon followed, was equally baneful, The old grudge 
against fortune's inequality awoke with new bitterness in their 
neighborhood, and Burns had no retreat but to " the rock of in- 
dependence," which is but an air castle, after all, that looks well 
at a distance, but will screen no one from real wind and wet. 
Flushed with irregular excitement, exasperated alternately by con- 
tempt of others and contempt of himself, Burns was no longer re- 
gaining his peace of mind, but fast losing it forever. There was 
a hoUowness at the heart of his life, for his conscience did not 
now approve what he was doing. 

Amid the vapors of unwise enjoyment, of bootless remorse and 
angry discontent with fate, his true loadstar, — a life of poetry, 
with poverty, nay, with famine if it must be so, — was too often 
altogether hidden from his eyes. And yet he sailed a sea where 
without some such loadstar there was no right steering. Meteors 
of French politics rose before him, but these were not his stars. 
An accident this, which hastened, but did not originate, his worst 
distresses. In the mad contentions of that time he comes in col- 
lision with certain official superiors,^ is wounded by them, — cruelly 
lacerated, we should say, could a dead, mechanical implement in 
any case be called cruel, — and shrinks, in indignant pain, into 
deeper self-seclusion, into gloomier moodiness, than ever. His 
life has now lost its unity ; it is a Hfe of fragments, led with little 
aim, — beyond the melancholy one of securing its own continu- 
ance, — in fits of wild, false joy when such offered, and of black 
despondency when they passed away. His character before the 
world begins to suffer ; calumny is busy with him ; for a miserable 
man makes more enemies than friends. Some faults he has fallen 
into, and a thousand misfortunes ; but deep criminality is what he 
stands accused of, and they that are not without sin cast the first 

1 Having behaved with gallantry at the seizing of a smuggling vessel in 
1792, Burns bought four small guns at the sale of her equipments, and sent 
them, with a letter, to the French Convention. They were retained by the 
customhouse authorities, and an inquiry into the poet's political conduct was 
ordered by the Board of Excise. 



74 CARLYLE. 

Stone at him! For is he not a wellwisher to the French Revo- 
lution, a Jacobin,! and, therefore, in that one act guilty of all? 
These accusations, political and moral, it has since appeared, were 
false enough ; but the world hesitated httle to credit them. Nay, 
his convivial Maecenases themselves were not the last to do it. 
There is reason to believe that in his later years the Dumfries 
aristocracy had partly withdrawn themselves from Burns, as from 
a tainted person no longer worthy of their acquaintance. That 
painful class stationed in all provincial cities behind the outmost 
breastwork of gentility, there to stand siege and do battle against 
the intrusions of grocerdom and grazierdom, had actually seen 
dishonor in the society of Burns and branded him with their veto ;2 
had, as we vulgarly say, cut him! We find one passage in this 
work of Mr. Lockhart's which will not out of our thoughts : 

" A gentleman of that county, whose name I have already more 
than once had occasion to refer to, has often told me that he was 
seldom more grieved than when, riding into Dumfries one fine 
summer evening about this time to attend a county ball, he saw 
Burns walking alone on the shady side of the principal street of 
the town, while the opposite side was gay with successive groups 
of gentlemen and ladies, all drawn together for the festivities of 
the night, not one of whom appeared wilhng to recognize him. 
The horseman dismounted and joined Burns, who, on his propos- 
ing to cross the street, said : ' Nay, nay, my yotmg friend ; that's 
all over now;' and quoted, after a pause, some verses of Lady 
Grizel Baillie's ^ pathetic ballad : 

1 A sympathizer with the French faction which took a leading part in the 
violent measures of the Revolution, called Jacobins from their place of meet- 
ing, a monastery of the Dominican monks of St. Jacques (James). The feel- 
ing against the French Revolutionists was very strong at this time in Eng- 
land. 

2 Literally (in Latin), " I forbid;" hence a negative, or a denial of recog- 
nition. 

3 A noble Scottish lady (1665- 1746), some of whose poems appeared in 
Ramsay's Tea-Table Miscellany. This ballad has a lasting place in Scottish 
literature. 



BURNS. 75 

" ' His bonnet ^ stood ance 2 fu' 3 fair on his brow, 
His auld ane look'd better than mony ane's new ; 
But now he lets 't wear ony way it will hing,* 
And casts himsell dowie^ upon the combing.^ 

" ' Oh, were we young as we ance hae been, 

We sud "^ hae been galloping down on yon green, 
* And linking 8 it ower the lily-white lea! 

And werena ^ my heart light, I wad i" die. ' 

It was little in Burns's character to let his feelings on certain 
subjects escape in this fashion. He immediately after reciting these 
verses assumed the sprightHness of his most pleasing manner, and, 
taking his young friend home with him, entertained him very 
agreeably till the hour of the ball arrived." 

Alas! when we think that Burns now sleeps "where bitter in- 
dignation can no longer lacerate his heart," ^i and that most of 
those fair dames and frizzled gentlemen already lie at his side, 
where the breastwork of gentility is quite thrown down, who 
would not sigh over the thin delusions and foolish toys that divide 
heart from heart and make man unmerciful to his brother? 

It was not now to be hoped that the genius of Burns would 
ever reach maturity or accomphsh aught worthy of itself. His 
spirit was jarred in its melody ; not the soft breath of natural feel- 
ing, but the rude hand of Fate, was now sweeping over the strings. 
And yet what harmony was in him, what music even in his dis- 
cords! How the wild tones had a charm for the simplest and 
the wisest, and all men felt and knew that here also was one of 
the gifted! " If he entered an inn at midnight, after all the in- 
mates were in bed, the news of his arrival circulated from the 
cellar to the garret, and ere ten minutes had elapsed the landlord 
and all his guests were assembled ! " 

1 Cap. 2 Once. 3 Full. * Hang. 

5 In low spirits. 6 Heap of corn. '^ Should. 

8 Tripping. 9 Were not. 10 Would. 

11 Ubi sava indignatio coritlterius lacerare nequit. From Swift's epitaph, 
composed by himself. 



76 CARLYLE. 

Some brief, pure moments of poetic life were yet appointed him 
in the composition of his songs. We can understand how he 
grasped at this employment, and how, too, he spurned all other 
reward for it but what the labor itself brought him.i For the soul 
of Burns, though scathed and marred, was yet Hving in its full 
moral strength, though sharply conscious of its errors and abase- 
ment ; and here, in his destitution and degradation, was one act 
of seeming nobleness and self-devotedness left even for him to 
perform. He felt, too, that, with all the "thoughtless follies" 
that had " laid him low," the world was unjust and cruel to him ; 
and he silently appealed to another and calmer time. Not as a 
hired soldier, but as a patriot, would he strive for the glory of his 
country ; so he cast from him the poor sixpence a day and served 
zealously as a volunteer. Let us not grudge him this last luxury 
of his existence ; let him not have appealed to us in vain! The 
money was not necessary to him ; he struggled through without 
it. Long since, these guineas would have been gone, and now 
the high-mindedness of refusing them will plead for him in all 
hearts forever. 

We are here arrived at the crisis of Burns's life, for matters had 
now taken such a shape with him as could not long continue. If 
improvement was not to be looked for, nature could only for a 
Hmited time maintain this dark and maddening warfare against 
the world and itself. We are not medically informed whether any 
continuance of years was at this period probable for Burns; 
whether his death is to be looked on as in some sense an ac- 
cidental event, or only as the natural consequence of the long 
series of events that had preceded. The latter seems to be the 
Hkelier opinion, and yet it is by no means a certain one. At all 

1 The greater number of Burns's songs were freely contributed to two 
collections of Scottish Airs, in which he took an active and patriotic interest. 
The publisher of one, Johnson's Musical Museum, he called " a patriot for 
the music of his country;" while to the projector of the second he wrote: 
" As to any remuneration, you may think my songs either above or below 
price, for they shall absolutely be one or the other." 



BURNS. 11 

events, as we have said^ some change could not be very distant. 
Three gates of deliverance, it seems to us, were open for Burns, 
— clear poetical activity, madness, or death. The first, with 
longer life, was still possible, though not probable, for physical 
causes were beginning to be concerned in it ; and yet Burns had 
an iron resolution, could he have but seen and felt that not only 
his highest glory, but his first duty and the true medicine for all 
his woes, lay here. The second was still less probable, for his 
mind was ever among the clearest and firmest. So the milder 
third gate was opened for him ; and he passed, not softly, yet 
speedily, into that still country where the hailstorms and fire 
showers do not reach, and the heaviest laden wayfarer at length 
lays down his load. 

Contemplating this sad end of Burns, and how he sank unaided 
by any real help, uncheered by any wise sympathy, generous 
minds have sometimes figured to themselves, with a reproachful 
sorrow, that much might have been done for him ; that by counsel, 
true affection, and friendly ministrations, he might have been saved 
to himself and the world. We question whether there is not more 
tenderness of heart than soundness of judgment in these sugges- 
tions. It seems dubious to us whether the richest, wisest, most 
benevolent individual could have lent Burns any effectual help. 
Counsel, which seldom profits any one, he did not need ; in his 
understanding he knew the right from the wrong as well, perhaps, 
as any man ever did ; but the persuasion which would have availed 
him lies not so much in the head as in the heart, where no argu- 
ment or expostulation could have assisted much to implant it. 
As to money, again, we do not believe that this was his essential 
want, or well see how any private man could, even presupposing 
Burns's consent, have bestowed on him an independent fortune 
with much prospect of decisive advantage. It is a mortifying 
truth that two men in any rank of society could hardly be found 
virtuous enough to give money, and to take it as a necessary gift, 
without injury to the moral entireness of one or both. But so 



78 CARLYLE. 

Stands the fact. Friendship, in the old heroic sense of that term, 
no longer exists ; except in the cases of kindred or other legal 
affinity, it is in reality no longer expected, or recognized as a virtue 
among men. A close observer of manners has pronounced 
"patronage" — that is, pecuniary or other economic furtherance 
— to be " twice cursed," cursing him that gives and him that takes. 
And thus in regard to outward matters also it has become the rule, 
as in regard to inward it always was and must be the rule, that no 
one shall look for effectual help to another, but that each shall rest 
contented with what help he can afford himself. Such, we say, 
is the principle of modern honor, naturally enough growing out 
of that sentiment of pride which we inculcate and encourage as 
the basis of our whole social morality. Many a poet has been 
poorer than Burns, but no one was ever prouder. We may ques- 
tion whether, without great precautions, even a pension from 
royalty would ftot have galled and encumbered more than actually 
assisted him. 

Still less, therefore, are we disposed to join with another class 
of Bums's admirers, who accuse the higher ranks among us of 
having ruined Burns by their selfish neglect of him. We have 
already stated our doubts whether direct pecuniary help, had it 
been offered, would have been accepted or could have proved 
very effectual. We shall readily admit, however, that much was 
to be done for Burns ; that many a poisoned arrow might have 
been warded from his bosom, many an entanglement in his path 
cut asunder by the hand of the powerful ; and light and heat shed 
on him from high places would have made his humble atmosphere 
more genial ; and the softest heart then breathing might have Hved 
and died with some fewer pangs. Nay, we shall grant further — 
and for Burns it is granting much — that, with all his pride, he 
would have thanked, even with exaggerated gratitude, any one 
who had cordially befriended him. Patronage, unless once cursed, 
needed not to have been twice so. At all events, the poor pro- 
motion he desired in his calling might have been granted. It was 
his own scheme, therefore likelier than any other to be of service. 



BURNS. 79 

All this it might have been a luxury — nay, it was a duty — for our 
nobility to have done. No part of all this, however, did any of 
them do, or apparently attempt or wish to do ; so much is granted 
against them. But what, then, is the amount of their blame? 
Simply that they were men of the world and walked by the prin- 
ciples of such men, — that they treated Exurns as other nobles and 
other commoners had done other poets; as the English did 
Shakespeare ;i as King Charles ^ and his Cavaliers did Butler; as 
King Philip 3 and his grandees * did Cervantes. ^ Do men gather 
grapes of thorns, or shall we cut down our thorns for yielding 
only a fence and haws? How, indeed, could the "nobility and 
gentry of his native land " hold out any help to this " Scottish 
bard, proud of his name and country " ? Were the nobility and 
gentry so much as able rightly to help themselves ? Had they 
not their game to preserve, their borough interests to strengthen? 
dinners, therefore, of various kinds to eat and give? Were their 
means more than adequate to all this business, or less than 
adequate? Less than adequate, in general. Few of them in 
reality were richer than Burns ; many of them were poorer ; for 
sometimes they had to wring their supplies as with thumbscrews 
from the hard hand, and in their need of guineas to forget their 
duty of mercy, which Burns was never reduced to do. Let us 
pity and forgive them. The game they preserved and shot, the 
dinners they ate and gave, the borough interests they strengthened, 
the little Babylons ^ they severally builded by the glory of their 

1 See Sonnet XXV. : 

" Let those who are in favor with their stars 
Of public honor and proud titles boast, 
Whilst I, whom fortune of such triumphs bars, 
Unlook'd for, joy in that I honor most." 

2 Charles II. (see Note i, p. 17). 3 Philip II. of Spain. 
* " Grandee" is the general term for a Spanish noble. 

5 Miguel Saavedra de Cervantes (1547- 1616), a Spanish author, whose 
fame rests on his Don Quixote. He lived and died in poverty, and was sev- 
eral times in prison. 

6 Or Babels. Pet hobbies or enterprises (see Gen. xi. 4-9). 



8o CARLYLE. 

might, are all melted or melting back into the primeval chaos, as 
man's merely selfish endeavors are fated to do. And here was an 
action extending, in virtue of its worldly influence, we may say, 
through all time ; in virtue of its moral nature, beyond all time, 
being immortal as the spirit of goodness itself; this action was 
offered them to do, and light was not given them to do it. Let us 
pity and forgive them. But, better than pity, let us go and do 
otherwise. Human suffering did not end with the Hfe of Burns ; 
neither was the solemn mandate, " Love one another," " Bear one 
another's burdens," ^ given to the rich only, but to all men. True, 
we shall find no Burns to relieve, to assuage by our aid or our 
pity ; but celestial natures groaning under the fardels 2 of a weary 
life we shall still find ; and that wretchedness which fate has ren- 
dered voiceless and tuneless is not the least wretched, but the most. 
^ Still, we do not think that the blame of Burns's failure lies chiefly 
with the world. The world, it seems to us, treated him with more, 
rather than with less, kindness than it usually shows to such men. 
It has ever, we fear, shown but small favor to its teachers ; hunger 
and nakedness, perils and revihngs, the prison, the cross, the 
poison chahce, have, in most times and countries, been the 
market price it has offered for wisdom, the welcome with which 
it has greeted those who have come to enhghten and purify it. 
Homer ^ and Socrates * and the Christian apostles belong to old 
days, but the world's martyrology was not completed with 
these. Roger Bacon ^ and Galileo ^ languish in priestly dungeons ; 

1 See John x-r. 12, and Gal. vi. 2. 

2 Burdens (see Hamlet, act iii. sc. 1). 

3 The old rhymed tradition reads : 

" Seven cities fought for Homer dead, 
Through which the living Homer begged his bread." 

* Socrates, for instructing the youth of Athens in a new form of philosophy, 
was put to death by poisoning, on a charge of unbelief and evil influence. 

5 Roger Bacon (1214 (?)-94), an English monk and philosopher far in 
advance of his age, whose writings were condemned by a council of monks, 
and who was thereupon thrown into prison for ten years. 

6 Galileo Galilei (1564- 1642), the great Italian astronomer and inventor 



BURNS. 8 1 

Tasso 1 pines in the cell of a madhouse ; Camoens ^ dies begging 
on the streets of Lisbon. So neglected, " so persecuted they the 
prophets," ^ not in Judasa only, but in all places where men have 
been. We reckon that every poet of Bturns's order is, or should 
be, a prophet and teacher to his age ; that he has no right to ex- 
pect great kindness from it, but rather is bound to do it great kind- 
ness ; that Burns in particular experienced fully the usual proportion 
of the world's goodness ; and that the blame of his failiure, as we 
have said, lies not chiefly with the world. 

i-'^Where, then, does it lie ? We are forced to answer, " With 
himself ; it is his inward, not his outward, misfortunes that bring 
him to the dust." Seldom, indeed, is it otherwise ; seldom is a 
life morally wrecked but the grand cause lies in some internal 
malarrangement, some want, less of good fortune than of good 
guidance. Nature fashions no creature without implanting in it 
the strength needful for its action and duration ; least of all does 
she so neglect her masterpiece and darling, the poetic soul. 
Neither can we believe that it is in the power of any external cir- 
cumstances utterly to ruin the mind of a man, — nay, if proper 
wisdom be given him, even so much as to affect its essential health 
and beauty. The sternest sum total of all worldly misfortunes is 
death ; nothing more can He in the cup of human woe ; yet many 
men in all ages have triumphed over death, and led it captive, 
converting its physical victory into a moral victory for them- 
selves, into a seal and immortal consecration for all that their 
past life had achieved. What has been done may be done again ; 

of the telescope, who, for demonstrating the truth of the Copernican system 
of the earth's motion, was forced by the papal government to do public pen- 
ance in his seventieth year, and was for some time imprisoned. 

1 Torquato Tasso (1544-95), a graceful Italian poet, best known for his 
great epic, Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Freed). He lived for some 
time with the Duke of Ferrara, but for some mysterious reason was impris- 
oned by the Duke for seven years. 

2 Luis Camoens (1524-79), a celebrated Portuguese poet, author of the 
patriotic epic, The Lusiad. His last years were passed in great poverty. 

3 See Matt. v. 12. 

s 



»2 CARLYLE. 

nay, it is but the degree, and not the kind, of such heroism that 
differs in different seasons ; for without some portion of this spirit, 
not of boisterous daring, but of silent fearlessness, of self-denial 
in all its forms, no good man, in any scene or time, has ever at- 
tained to be good. 

We have already stated the error of Burns, and mourned over 
it rather than blamed it. It was the want of unity in his purposes, 
of consistency in his aims, the hapless attempt to mingle in friendly 
union the common spirit of the world with the spirit of poetry, 
which is of a far different and altogether irreconcilable nature. 
Burns was nothing wholly, and Burns could be nothing — no man 
formed as he was can be anything— by halves. The heart, not 
of a mere hot-blooded, popular versemonger, or poetical restau- 
rateur^ but of a true poet and singer worthy of the old religious, 
heroic times, had been given him ; and he fell in an age, not of 
heroism and rehgion, but of skepticism, selfishness, and triviahty, 
when true nobleness was little understood, and its place supphed 
by a hollow, dissocial, altogether barren and unfruitful principle 
of pride. The influences of that age, his open, kind, susceptible 
nature, to say nothing of his highly untoward situation, made it 
more than usually difficult for him to cast aside or rightly subor- 
dinate ; the better spirit that was within him ever sternly de- 
manded its rights, its supremacy. He spent his Hfe in endeavoring 
to reconcile these two, and lost it, as he must lose it, without 
reconciling them. 

Burns was born poor, and born also to continue poor, for he 
would not endeavor to be otherwise. This it had been well 
could he have once for all admitted, and considered as finally 
settled. He was poor, truly, but hundreds even of his own class 
and order of minds have been poorer, yet have suffered nothing 
deadly from it. Nay, his own father had a far sorer battle with 
ungrateful destiny than his was ; and he did not yield to it, but 
died courageously warring, and to all moral intents prevailing, 

1 Literally, the keeper of an eating house ; a mere purveyor of refreshment 
or amusement. 



BURNS. S3 

against it. True, Burns had little means, had even little time for 
poetry, his only real pursuit and vocation ; but so much the more 
precious was what little he had. In all these external respects 
his case was hard, but very far from the hardest. Poverty, in- 
cessant drudgery, and much worse evils it has often been the lot 
of poets and wise men to strive with, and their glory to conquer. 
Locke was banished as a traitor, and wrote his " Essay on the 
Human Understanding " sheltering himself in a Dutch garret. ^ 
Was Milton rich or at his ease when he composed " Paradise 
Lost? " 2 Not only low, but fallen from a height ; not only poor, 
but impoverished ; in darkness and with dangers compassed round, 
he sang his immortal song, and found fit audience, though few. 
Did not Cervantes finish his work a maimed soldier and in prison? 
Nay, was not the " Araucana," ^ which Spain acknowledges as its 
epic, written, without even the aid of paper, on scraps of leather, 
as the stout fighter and voyager snatched any moment from that 
wild warfare? 

And what, then, had these men which Burns wanted? Two 
things, both which, it seems to us, are indispensable for such men. 
They had a true, religious principle of morals, and a single, not a 
double, aim in their activity. They were not self-seekers and 
self -worshipers, but seekers and worshipers of something far better 
than self. Not personal enjoyment was their object, but a high, 
heroic idea of rehgion, of patriotism, of heavenly wisdom, in one 
or the other form, ever hovered before them ; in which cause they 
neither shrank from suffering nor called on the earth to witness 
it as something wonderful, but patiently endured, counting it 

1 John Locke (1632- 1704), the great English philosopher, followed the 
fortunes of the Earl of Shaftesbury, and retired with him into exile in Holland 
in 1682. 

2 Paradise Lost was written not only after Milton's blindness and loss of 
fortune, but when the Restoration had rendered his position as precarious as 
it had been distinguished under the Commonwealth. 

3 An account of ^n expedition against the Araucanians in South America, 
held to be the best heroic poem in the Spanish language, and said to have 
been written in the wilderness by Alonzo de Ercilla (1533-95). 



84 CARLYLE. 

blessedness enough so to spend and be spent. Thus the " golden 
calf of self-love," ^ however curiously carved, was not their deity, 
but the invisible Goodness which alone is man's reasonable ser- 
vice. This feeling was as a celestial fountain whose streams 
refreshed into gladness and beauty all the provinces of their other- 
wise too desolate existence. In a word, they willed one thing, 
to which all other things were subordinated and made subservient, 
and therefore they accomplished it. The wedge will rend rocks, 
but its edge must be sharp and single ; if it be double, the wedge 
is bruised in pieces and will rend nothing. 

Part of this superiority these men owed to their age, in which 
heroism and devotedness were still practiced, or at least not yet 
disbelieved in ; but much of it likewise they owed to themselves. 
With Burns, again, it was different. His morality in most of its 
practical points is that of a mere worldly man ; enjoyment in a 
finer or coarser shape is the only thing he longs and strives for. 
A noble instinct sometimes raises him above this, but an instinct 
only, and acting only for moments. He has no rehgion ; in the 
shallow age where his days were cast, rehgion was not discrimi- 
nated from the New and Old Light forms of rehgion, and was 
with these becoming obsolete in the minds of men. His heart, 
indeed, is alive with a trembling adoration, but there is no temple 
in his understanding. He lives in darkness and in the shadow 
of doubt. His religion at best is an anxious wish ; hke that of 
Rabelais,^ "a great perhaps." 

He loved poetry warmly and in his heart ; could he but have 
loved it purely and with his whole, undivided heart, it had been 
well. For poetry as Burns could have followed it is but another 
form of wisdom, of religion ; is itself wisdom and religion. But 

1 See Exod. xxxii., where the Jews made an idol in the form of a golden 
calf, and " fashioned it with a graving tool." 

2 Frangois Rabelais (1495 -1553), ^ French scholar, physician, and phi- 
losopher, yet fitly called by Lord Bacon " the great jester of France." He 
took vows as a monk, but soon threw them off and directed the coarse and 
vigorous satire of his Gargantua and Pantagruel chiefly against the religious 
orders. 



BURNS. 85 

this also was denied him. His poetry is a stray, vagrant gleam, 
which will not be extinguished within him, yet rises not to be the 
true light of his path, but is often a wildfire that misleads him. It 
was not necessary for Burns to be rich, to be or to seem " inde- 
pendent ;" but it was necessary for him to be at one with his own 
heart ; to place what was highest in his nature highest also in his 
life ; " to seek within himself for that consistency and sequence 
which external events would forever refuse him." He was bom 
a poet ; poetry was the celestial element of his being, and should 
have been the soul of his whole endeavors. Lifted into that serene 
ether whither he had wings given him to mount, he would have 
needed no other elevation. Poverty, neglect, and all evil, save the 
desecration of himself and his art, were a small matter to him ; 
the pride and the passions of the world lay far beneath his feet ; 
and he looked down alike on noble and slave, on prince and 
beggar, and all that wore the stamp of man, with clear recogni- 
tion, with brotherly affection, with sympathy, with pity. Nay, we 
question whether, for his culture as a poet, poverty and much 
suffering for a season were not absolutely advantageous. Great 
men, in looking back over their lives, have testified to that effect. 
" I would not for much," says Jean Paul,i " that I had been born 
richer." And yet Paul's birth was poor enough, for in another 
place he adds : " The prisoner's allowance is bread and water, and 
I had often only the latter." But the gold that is refined in the 
hottest furnace comes out the purest ; or, as he has himself ex- 
pressed it, " the canary bird sings sweeter the longer it has been 
trained in a darkened cage." 

A man hke Burns might have divided his hours between poetry 

1 Jean Paul Friedrich Richter (1763- 1825"), a German humorist, novelist, 
and philosopher, who clothed much wisdom and poetic inspiration in a style 
which, according to Carlyle, is " fantastic, many-colored, far-grasping, every 
way perplexed and extraordinary. " The two novels, Hesperus and Titan, Car- 
lyle calls the largest and best of his works of fiction, while his Introduction 
to Esthetics, and Levana,— a treatise on education,— are the most important 
of his serious works. 



86 CARLYLE. 

and virtuous industry ; industry which all true feeling sanctions, 
nay, prescribes, and which has a beauty for that cause beyond the 
pomp of thrones ; but to divide his hours between poetry and rich 
men's banquets was an ill-starred and inauspicious attempt. How 
could he be at ease at such banquets ? What had he to do there, 
mingling his music with the coarse roar of altogether earthly 
voices, brightening the thick smoke of intoxication with fire lent 
him from heaven ? Was it his aim to enjoy life ? To-morrow he 
must go drudge as an exciseman! We wonder not that Burns 
became moody, indignant, and at times an offender against cer- 
tain rules of society, but rather that he did not grow utterly frantic 
and run amuck against them all. How could a man so falsely 
placed, by his own or others' fault, ever know contentment or 
peaceable diligence for an hour? What he did under such per- 
verse guidance, and what he forbore to do, alike fill us with as- 
tonishment at the natural strength and worth of his character. 

Doubtless there was a remedy for this perverseness, but not in 
others ; only in himself ; least of all in simple increase of wealth 
and worldly "respectabihty." We hope we have now heard 
enough about the efficacy of wealth for poetry, and to make poets 
happy. Nay, have we not seen another instance of it in these 
very days? Byron, a man of an endowment considerably less 
ethereal than that of Burns, is born in the rank not of a Scottish 
plowman, but of an Enghsh peer ; the highest worldly honors, the 
fairest worldly career, are his by inheritance ; the richest harvest 
of fame he soon reaps in another province by his own hand. And 
what does all this avail him? Is he happy? is he good? is he 
true ? Alas ! he has a poet's soul, and strives toward the infinite 
and the eternal, and soon feels that all this is but mounting to the 
housetop to reach the stars ! Like Burns, he is only a proud man ; 
might, Hke him, have " purchased a pocket copy of Milton to study 
the character of Satan ; " ^ for Satan also is Byron's grand exemplar,^ 

1 See the Letters of Burns, No, LIV., to William Nicol. In Letter LIIL 
Burns says also : " Give me a spirit like my favorite hero, Milton's Satan." 
* Model, or copy to be imitated. 



BURNS. 87 

the hero of his poetry, and the model, apparently, of his con- 
duct. As in Burns's case, too, the celestial element will not 
mingle with the clay of earth ; both poet and man of the world 
he must not be ; vulgar ambition will not live kindly with poetic 
adoration ; he cannot serve God and Mammon. ^ Byron, like 
Burns, is not happy ; nay, he is the most wretched of all men. 
His life is falsely arranged. The fire that is in him is not a strong, 
still, central fire, warming into beauty the products of a world, but 
it is the mad fire of a volcano ; and now, — we look sadly into the 
ashes of a crater which ere long will fill itself with snow! 

Byron and Burns were sent forth as missionaries to their gen- 
eration, to teach it a higher doctrine, a purer truth ; they had a 
message to deliver which left them no rest till it was accomplished ; 
in dim throes of pain this divine behest lay smoldering within them, 
for they knew not what it meant, and felt it only in mysterious an- 
ticipation, and they had to die without articulately uttering it. 
They are in the camp of the unconverted, yet not as high mes- 
sengers of rigorous though benignant Truth, but as soft, flattering 
singers, and in pleasant fellowship will they live there ; they are 
first adulated,^ then persecuted ; they accomplish little for others ; 
they find no peace for themselves, but only death and the peace 
of the grave. We confess it is not without a certain mournful 
awe that we view the fate of these noble souls, so richly gifted, 
yet ruined to so little purpose with all their gifts. It seems to us 
there is a stern moral taught in this piece of history, — twice told 
us in our own time! Surely to men of like genius, if there be 
any such, it carries with it a lesson of deep, impressive significance. 
Surely it would become such a man, fmrnished for the highest of 
all enterprises,— that of being the poet of his age,— to consider 
well what it is that he attempts and in what spirit he attempts it. 
For the words of Milton are true in all times and were never truer 
than in this : " He who would write heroic poems must make his 

1 The personification of riches, and hence of worldly glory (see Matt, 
vi. 24). 

2 Flattered. 



88 CARL YLE. 

whole life a heroic poem." ^ If he cannot first so make his life, 
then let him hasten from this arena ; for neither its lofty glories 
nor its fearful perils are fit for him. Let him dwindle into a 
modish ballad monger ; let him worship and besing the idols of 
the time, and the time will not fail to reward him, — if, indeed, he 
can endure to live in that capacity! Byron and Bums could not 
live as idol priests, but the fire of their own hearts consumed them ; 
and better it was for them that they could not. For it is not in 
the favor of the great or of the small, but in a hfe of truth, and 
in the inexpugnable ^ citadel of his own soul, that a Byron's or a 
Burns's strength must he. Let the great stand aloof from him 
or know how to reverence him. Beautiful is the union of wealth 
with favor and furtherance for literature, like the costliest flower 
jar inclosing the loveliest amaranth. Yet let not the relation be 
mistaken. A true poet is not one whom they can hire by money 
or flattery to be a minister of their pleasures, their writer of occa- 
sional verses, their purveyor of table wit ; he cannot be their 
menial ; he cannot even be their partisan. At the peril of both 
parties, let no such union be attempted! Will a courser of the 
sun 3 work softly in the harness of a dray horse? His hoofs are 
of fire, and his path is through the heavens, bringing Hght to all 
lands ; will he lumber on mud highways, dragging ale for earthly 
appetites from door to door? 

But we must stop short in these considerations, which would 
lead us to boundless lengths. We had something to say on the 
public moral character of Burns, but this also we must forbear. 
We are far from regarding him as guilty before the world, as guil- 
tier than the average ; nay, from doubting that he is less guilty 
than one of ten thousand. Tried at a tribunal far more rigid than 

1 The correct quotation is : " He who would not be frustrate of his hope 
to write well hereafter in laudable things, ought himself to be a true poem." 
— Apology for Smectyt?tnitus. 

2 Unconquerable. 

^ The Greek sun god, Helios, was said to pass each day across the heavens 
in a chariot drawn by four horses. 



BURNS. 89 

that where the plebiscita ^ of common civic reputations are pro- 
nounced, he has seemed to us even there less worthy of blame than 
of pity and wonder. But the world is habitually unjust in its judg- 
ments of such men; unjust on many grounds, of which this one 
may be stated as the substance : it decides, hke a court of law, by 
dead statutes, and not positively, but negatively, — less on what is 
done right than on what is or is not done wrong. Not the few 
inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so 
easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, 
constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its 
diameter the breadth of the solar system ; or it may be a city hippo- 
drome,2 nay, the circle of a gin horse,^ its diameter a score of feet 
or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured, and it is 
assumed that the diameter of the gin horse and that of the planet 
will yield the same ratio when compared with them. Here lies the 
root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts,* 
Rousseaus,^ which one never listens to with approval. Granted the 
ship comes into harbor with shrouds and tackle damaged ; the pilot 
is blameworthy ; he has not been all- wise and all-powerful ; but to 
know how blameworthy tell us first whether his voyage has been 
round the globe, or only to Ramsgate ^ and the Isle of Dogs.'^ 

1 Plural of l.aXin plebiscitum, meaning an ordinance passed by the plebs, 
or common people, without the concurrence of the senate, or patrician body. 

2 A circus, or place for races. 

3 " Gin horse," i.e., a horse set to walk in a circle so as to move a cotton gin. 
* Jonathan Swift (1667- 1745), an English satirist, remarkable for the 

trenchant and witty style of his prose works, of which The Tale of a Tub, and 
Gulliver's Travels are the best known. His character, though harsh, was less 
unlovely than it has often been represented, and was imbittered by the life- 
long apprehension of the insanity of his latest years. 

5 Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), one of the most powerful prose writ- 
ers of France. He was distinguished for his eloquent style, his ardor for 
liberty, and his unusual insight into natural beauty, but also for his lack of 
moral principle. His Social Contract and other works gave a powerful impulse 
to the French Revolution. *> A Kentish seaport and popular resort. 

■^ The peninsula in the Thames opposite Greenwich, where the royal 
hounds were formerly kept. 



90 CAI^L YLE. 

With our readers in general, with men of right feehng anj-- 
where, we are not required to plead for Burns. In pitying ad- 
miration he lies enshrined in all our hearts, in a far nobler mauso- 
leum than that one of marble ; neither will his works, even as they 
are, pass away from the memory of men. While the Shakespeares 
and Miltons roll on like mighty rivers through the country of 
Thought, bearing fleets of traffickers and assiduous pearl fishers 
on their waves, this little Valclusa i fountain will also arrest our 
eye ; for this also is of Nature's own and most cunning work- 
manship ; bursts from the depths of the earth with a full, gushing 
current into the light of day ; and often will the traveler turn aside 
to drink of its clear waters and muse among its rocks and pines ! 

1 The romantic valley near Avignon whither the Italian poet and scholar, 
Francesco Petrarca, retired, in 1338, for some years. The parallel suggested 
is between the lasting fame of Petrarch's sonnets to Laura, and that predicted 
for Burns's songs. 



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